Legend of the oldest off-road vehicle jeep..video

Legend of the oldest off-road vehicle jeep..video

Jeep is an automobile marque (and registered trademark) of Chrysler. It is the oldest off-road vehicle (also sport utility vehicle – SUV) brand. It inspired a number of other military Light Utility Vehicles such as the Land Rover which is the second oldest brand. The original vehicle which first appeared as the prototype Bantam BRC became the primary light 4-wheel-drive vehicle of the US Army and Allies during World War II and the postwar period. Many vehicles serving similar military and civilian roles have since been created by many nations

The origin of the word "jeep"

There are many explanations of the origin of the word "jeep," all of which have proven difficult to verify. The most widely held theory is that the military designation of GP begat the term "Jeep" and holds that the vehicle bore the designation "GP" (for "Government Purposes" or "General Purpose"), which was phonetically slurred into the word jeep.  However, an alternate view launched by R. Lee Ermey, on his television series Mail Call, disputes this, saying that the vehicle was designed for specific duties, and was never referred to as "General Purpose" and it is highly unlikely that the average jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with this designation. The Ford GPW abbreviation actually meant (G for government use, P to designate its 80-inch (2,000 mm) wheelbase  and W to indicate its Willys-Overland designed engine).

Many, including Ermey, suggest that soldiers at the time were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar. Eugene the Jeep was Popeye's "jungle pet" and was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems."[1]

Words of the Fighting Forces by Clinton A. Sanders, a dictionary of military slang, published in 1942, in the library at The Pentagon gives this definition