Is it a truck? Is it a sedan? No. It’s an El Camino

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Boy, do we like the classic car-turned-pick up, or ‘coupe utility’ as some people prefer to call them. The Ford Ranchero may have been the first of the breed, hailing from the US, but our favourite is the Chevy El Camino. If only it was for that superbly catchy name (simply meaning ‘the road’, by the way).

Still, the Americans were not the official inventors of the genre. The coupe utility originates from Australia, where they call ‘m Utes and worship 'm like King Bhumibol. They were born by chance. Legend has it that a farmer’s wife from rural Victoria wrote to Ford of Australia in 1932, asking the company to build a car that could carry her to church on Sundays and her husband’s pigs to market on Mondays. Ford believed she may not have been on her own and came up with a pick-up that was based on a saloon. It actually used its front, too, and was bound to become a hit.

Oh - the Impala based El Camino was launched this week in 1958 but discontinued in 1987. The only market where the genre still is thriving is… Down Under.

Words Jeroen Booij, picture courtesy GM

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