No car has worn a Willys nameplate since 1963, but the American automaker's legacy lives on today in the modern Jeep Wrangler. The original Jeep was developed in the early 1940s as a military vehicle for use in World War II, and its success lead to the development of an entire Jeep brand, now owned by Chrysler.
Standard Wheel Company founded its car division, the Overland Company, in 1903. Claude E. Cox, a recent graduate from the Ross Polytechnic Institute, was tapped to develop the company prototype. A dozen Overlands were built that year, and 24 more in 1904. In 1906, dealer John North Willys ordered 500 cars, but the company was nearly ruined by the 1907 Bankers Panic. When no cars were produced, Willys took ownership of the company, and in the name became Willys-Overland.
Willys knew how to sell cars, and he ramped up production immediately and dramatically. By 1912, Willys was building more cars than... View more any other U.S. automaker except Ford. In 1914, Willys began production of what would be the company's best-selling model to date, the Willys-Knight.
The Overland brand was discontinued in 1926 at the introduction of Willys' new small car brand, the Whippet, but both the Whippet and the Willys-Knight would be gone by the early 1930s, in the wake of a 1929 recession. John Willys died in 1935. Over the next few years, the company languished near the brink, only to be revived by a vehicle that was nothing like a passenger car.
In 1940, the U.S. Army made an open call for design submissions for a four-wheel drive vehicle that could carry a crew of three, with a wheelbase of no more than 75 inches, a fold-down windshield, a 660-pound payload, an engine producing 85 foot-pounds of torque, and a weight of no more than 1,300 pounds. The three automakers who responded were Ford, Bantam, and Willys. While Bantam was the only firm able to produce a prototype in time, the Army deemed their production capacity inadequate and gave the production contract to Willys--along with Bantam's designs. To meet demand, Ford was also contracted. The three resulting vehicles--the Willy MB, the Bantam "Blitz Buggy", and the Ford GPW--were very similar; the Jeep's signature vertical slat grille was actually a Ford design. There is some debate over the origin of the term "Jeep", but the nickname has been with the vehicle from its earliest prototype days. In 1941, a picture of an MB driving up the Capitol steps was published in the Washington Daily News, with "jeep" used in the caption, thus seeding the word in the public consciousness. The Jeep proved a formidable military tool.
A civilian version of the Jeep, called the CJ, was available by 1945. Kaiser Motors purchased Willys in 1953, forming Willys Motors Incorporated and phasing out passenger cars in order to focus on Jeeps and Jeep-based trucks and wagons. When the company name changed to Kaiser-Jeep in 1963, the Willys name was gone for good. View less
