Here's one for you guys in the Northern Hemisphere;

I was told recently that the history of Jeep and their current financial crisis stems from the second world war where they were contracted by the US Government to build the infamous Willy's Jeep. This meant that their supply to the trade of the Jeep range was halted due to the supply to the US army for military purposes. After the war, the US government failed to honor their financial commitments and Jeep as we know them have never managed to recover.

I'm curious to establish if this is true or not.

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06 CRD LTD ( Euro )

Pretty much false.

Jeep started from a very small autommaker called Bantom and won a contract from the military for a light weight vehicle.Due to the volume needed by the military almost all of the production was handled by Ford and Willy's Overland with Bantom's design which pretty much killed Bantom.

http://www.hrja.org/jeep.htm

Bantom went on to make trailers pulled by the jeep as we know it.

Remember the country was in a depression and Ford and Willys convinced the government that Batam didn't have the capacity to meet the demand and screwed Bantam out of the picture. Many Bantam jeeps were sold to Russia and they were prefered over the later Willys product.

the original design was specified by a quarter master. Bantam was required to turn over design specifications to Ford and Willys but there were none so they had to write them. They used many Bantam motor car parts in the original design. The last trip to the Henry Ford Museum I took (about 20 years ago) there was a example of the Bantam "jeep" on display.

there were even some Articulated ones produced and the remaining few are very rare. For more on the subject google "American Bantam car company"
http://oldcarandtruckpictures.com/Jeeps ... Jeeps.html

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Atlantic Blue 06 CRD Limited (his)
Joined by a 2000 XJ Classic (hers)

The Jeep name has been bought and sold by some pretty big players over the years. Any success or lack thereof, has been a result of management of these various corporations.

If you follow all of the links here, you will not be able to finish the reading in a whole day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep

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Manure green 2005 CRD sport4x4, GDE Hot tune, Cat Gut, OE skids, Draw tight hitch, Duramax lift pump, 160K on multiple varieties of fuel, XM radio, Escort live with Redline, fog light mod, GPS, Icom IC7000 all band radio call sign KC9QPF, Grabber AT2s on Soft 8s, FIA grill blanket.

Inc made a pretty well-put-together thread on this subject.

http://www.lostjeeps.com/forum/phpBB3/vie ... hp?t=40202

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In this war of lines, so many have been crossed. Where will it all stop?

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