Jeep Wagoneer SJ

Brooks Stevens, who drew this, is the man who popularised the phrase planned obsolescence, defining it as instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary. He then produced a shape that stayed in production for twenty-nine years. The same hand did the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, the Excalibur, the 1962 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk and the 1949 Harley-Davidson Hydra-Glide. The Wagoneer works because it is drawn flat. Flat glass, upright pillars, a horizontal beltline, a body that reads as a box on purpose rather than by accident, which is why it never dated so much as settled. Almost every change across three decades happened at the ends. The 1979 restyle brought one-piece aluminium bumpers and a one-piece chrome plastic grille, the nose owners call the pig nose, and it ran to 1985. Simulated woodgrain arrived on the flanks in 1971 and stayed to the end in 1991. The two-door version was redrawn and reissued in 1974 as the Cherokee.

There is no Wagoneer competition record, and the reason is visible from twenty feet away: this is a 4,500-pound family wagon, and Jeep put its competition energy into the CJ, which was light, cheap and already winning in the desert. The engine is a different story. The 230-cubic-inch Tornado overhead-cam six that launched the Wagoneer in 1963 was dropped in the United States after two model years, but Kaiser's Argentine arm, IKA, kept building it from 1965 to 1973, where it became the engine of the Torino. In 1969 IKA took works Torinos to the Nürburgring for the 84-hour Marathon de la Route with around 250 horsepower at 5,200rpm. The number three car, driven by Eduardo Copello, Alberto Rodríguez Larreta and Oscar Mauricio Franco, covered 334 laps, more than any other entry in the race, and was classified fourth after the penalties it collected along the way. The engine America gave up on ran four days flat out around the Nordschleife.

The Wagoneer is the vehicle that taught Americans to want a truck in the driveway, and it closed the argument with fake wood. Simulated woodgrain went on the flanks in 1971 and stayed for twenty years, the last mass-market echo of the wood-bodied station wagon, and it became shorthand for a particular kind of money: ski towns, horse trailers, coastal driveways, the school run in something that could genuinely tow. Jeep has never let the name go. It returned in 1993 on the ZJ Grand Cherokee as a one-year Grand Wagoneer, 6,378 built and then dropped, and again in 2022 as the flagship Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer, sold explicitly on the memory of this truck. There is a small restoration industry underneath it as well. Wagonmaster in Texas has been rebuilding and reselling Grand Wagoneers since 1991, the year the last one was made, which is not something many discontinued vehicles can claim.

Rust is the whole conversation. An SJ is body-on-frame steel with a tailgate that holds water, rear wheel arches that rot from the inside, floors under the carpet and a frame that suffers around the rear spring hangers. Then add the woodgrain, which seals moisture against the body sides, so the panel that looks best is often hiding the worst of it. Lift a corner before you commit. Everything mechanical is friendly by comparison. The AMC sixes and V8s are simple, understressed and cheap to rebuild, the Dana axles are shared with half the American 4x4 industry, and the three-speed automatics are as durable as anything of their era. Quadra-Trac's full-time system is the one piece worth understanding before you buy, because a neglected one is a specialist job rather than an afternoon. The other thing to expect is thirst. A 360 or 401 four-wheel-drive wagon of this weight was never economical even when fuel was cheap, and the last Grand Wagoneers were being called gas-guzzlers while they were still in the showroom. Owners budget for it and stop thinking about it.