What’s a Scout?
Noticing the popularity of military surplus Jeeps as off-road fun cars, IHC created the original Scout to blend the capability of those vehicles with car-like comfort, releasing the original Scout in 1961.
While it would seem basic and utilitarian to today’s eyes, the Scout was a revelation for off-road fans, and Jeep, Ford and General Motors directly responded with the original Wagoneer, Bronco and Chevy Blazer.
The Scout was originally designed to be configured as either a small pickup or an SUV with a removable top, layouts which continued in the even more popular second-generation Scout II, introduced in 1971.
Popular throughout its life, unrelated financial problems and labor strife at IHC forced the company to sell off the niche product to an Indiana RV builder in May of 1980. The pinch on gas-hungry vehicles from the second OPEC crisis and the 1980 recession finished off the venture by that October, bringing production to an abrupt end.
As the popularity of classic off-roaders has boomed, so have the prices of nice classic Scouts, particularly the larger and better-proportioned Scout II.
Plans for the initial batch of Scouts center on just two sketches, one of which bears the name of Volkswagen designer Nico Pressler. A short-ish four-door midsize SUV with proportions similar to the Scout II and a larger four-door pickup are depicted. But in bringing back the Scout, Volkswagen not only taps the history of the basic Scout II, but all of the other tangential IHC passenger vehicles.
Prior to 1975, IHC also built full-size pickups and SUVs, and there were many versions of the Scout. The new company could easily revive the Terra pickup, the long-wheelbase Scout Traveler, the proto-Bronco-Raptor Scout SSII, the full-size pickups or the Chevy Suburban-sized Travelall.
