page_title: Sport utility vehicle
section_title: 1930s to 1948: Early models and military vehicles
hierarchical_section_title: Sport utility vehicle / History / 1930s to 1948: Early models and military vehicles
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context_page_description: A Sport utility vehicle or SUV is a car classification that combines elements of road-going passenger cars with features from off-road vehicles, such as raised ground clearance and four-wheel drive.
  There is no commonly agreed-upon definition of an SUV, and usage of the term varies between countries. Some definitions claim that an SUV must be built on a light truck chassis; however, broader definitions consider any vehicle with off-road design features to be an SUV. A crossover SUV is often defined as an SUV built with a unibody construction, however in many cases crossovers are simply referred to as SUVs. In some countries — such as the United States — SUVs have been classified as "light trucks", resulting in more lenient regulations compared to passenger cars.
  The predecessors to SUVs date back to military and low-volume models from the late 1930s, and the four-wheel drive station wagons and carryalls that began to be introduced in 1949. The 1984 Jeep Cherokee is considered to be the first SUV in the modern style. Some SUVs produced today use unibody construction; however, in the past, more SUVs used body-on-frame construction.
context_section_description: Just before and during World War II, prototypes and low-volume production examples of cars with sedan or station-wagon type bodies and rugged, off-road capable four-wheel drive chassis began to appear around the world. These early models included the 1936 Kurogane Type 95 from Japan, the 1938 GAZ-61 from Russia, and the 1941 Volkswagen Kommandeurswagen and 1936 Opel Geländesportwagen from Germany. An early predecessor to the design of modern SUVs was the 1940 Humber Heavy Utility, a four-wheel drive off-road vehicle built on the chassis of the Humber Super Snipe passenger car.
  The most prohibitive initial factors to the potential civilian popularity of an SUV-like car was their cost and the availability of certain critical parts. Before the war, adding four-wheel drive to a car almost doubled its cost. Compared to a common, rear-wheel drive vehicle, any 4WD (four-wheel drive) needed a number of essential extra components, including a transfer case and a second differential and constant-velocity joints for the driven front axle—which were expensive due to the precision involved in manufacturing gears and other parts. In America prior to World War II, these were produced only by a few specialized firms with limited production capacity. Due to the increase in demand for parts for the war effort, in the spring of 1942 Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet joined in fabricating these parts in mass quantities, boosting their production more than 100-fold.
  An early usage of the term was the 1947 Crosley CC Four Sport Utility model, which used a convertible wagon body style and is therefore unrelated to the design of later SUVs.
caption: 1938–1945 GAZ-61
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