Jeep!

I was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday when I saw some Jeep commercials that showed the WWII Jeeps.

I thought about that and wondered about where the term Jeep came from.

I looked on line this morning and saw Jeep was derived from the army term GP for general purpose vehicle.

The original Jeep vehicles had an interesting start. I had seen the name Willys on those Super Bowl commercials so I looked up Willys and found some very interesting things. I will summarize what I found. The entire story is interesting at this link, Willys.

The Willys motor company history was interesting to me.

John Willys bought the Overland automotive division from the Standard Wheel company in 1908. And in 1912 renamed his company Willys Overland.

The company was reorganized in 1936 after a depression-era bankruptcy.

The company built some really great street rods in 1940, one of which is shown on the web page link above.

The federal government realized the U.S. would be at war in the late 1930's so they set out a contract for a utility vehicle to carry passengers and ammunition.

There were half a million built by Willys and Ford motor company.

Willys was bought out by Kaiser motor company in 1953. Kaiser was bought by the AMC motor company in 1970, which like Harley Davidson motorcycles that AMC bought soon turned to crap. AMC was bought out by Chrysler in 1987 and Chrysler turned the once fine Jeep into an even less desirable product in my estimation.

There is a lot more interesting information on the web link above, so please give it a look see.

The final straw was when the German company Daimler bought Chrysler in 1998, the Vehicle that won the war over Germany has now ended up in German hands.

So who really won, well that is for you to decide.