Lee Iacocca Is Rightly Remembered For The Mustang And K-Car. But The Minivan Is His Biggest Legacy.

In the days since his death at 94, former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca has been rightly lauded as the father of the Mustang, from his days at Ford, and the brand-saving K-car, from his time at Chrysler. But when I think of Iacocca, one word comes to mind: minivan.

Iacocca did not invent the minivan, any more than Ray Kroc invented McDonald’s. Rather, both men had the vision to see the massive potential of their respective products and the will and smarts to bring them to market.

From the excellent Automotive News obituary of Iacocca, we learn that both Ford, under Hal Sperlich, and Chrysler, under Burt Bouwkamp, dreamed up the idea of a smaller van, aimed at families, in the early 1970s. Unlike today, when minivans are marketed for their roominess and convenience, these product designers were looking to create a vehicle that was “garageable;” in other words, make a van big enough for family use but small enough to fit in family garages.

But these early versions came to naught because of two of the worst traits of the U.S. auto industry: top-down, gut-level decisions not based on data or market research, and copycat syndrome. At Ford, Henry Ford II spurned Sperlich’s idea. At Chrysler, CEO John Riccardo killed Bouwkamp’s minivan, arguing that if a market for such a vehicle existed, “GM and Ford would have one,” according to Automotive News.

Sperlich came to Chrysler with Iacocca after Ford fired him, and his minivan idea had a second chance.

I love the minivan. Not only for its immense, unapologetic, in-your-face, so-uncool-it’s-cool utility. I love the minivan because it’s my favorite example of a product people didn’t know they absolutely, positively could not live without until they saw it.

These kinds of products come along once in a generation. They are such slam-dunk hits that you’d think they’d be no-brainers to dream up, like clean drinking water. But they’re not. It takes a special genius to look at what everyone else is looking at and be the only one to see the vast hole in the market, the gaping need so elemental that consumers might not even be able to put it into words. If you asked car buyers of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s what they needed and described the minivan, maybe they wouldn’t get it. It takes that connection – actually seeing the thing that fits the uniquely shaped hole in your need – that makes consumers shout, “Yes! That’s it! That is exactly it!” Product geniuses take the inchoate and make it real. Steve Jobs did this. So did Iacocca.

And let’s be honest: The K-car was a revolutionary sedan platform, with a transverse engine and front-wheel drive. But it was a sedan, and we had seen those before. The Mustang created the Pony car category, but it was – and remains – a niche vehicle, more a part of the national imagination than the nation’s driveways. The minivan, though, was both: revolutionary and a massive commercial success. That’s why it’s Iacocca’s most important and lasting legacy. In 2018, 53 years after its introduction, Ford celebrated its 10 millionth Mustang made. By 2000, 16 years after the Plymouth Voyager debuted, Americans were buying 1.4 million minivans per year.

To be strict about it, Chrysler’s were not the first minivans. That honor may go to the 1936 Stout Scarab, an aerodynamic Art Deco rolling salon that looked more like a Bauhaus toaster than a car. It featured movable chairs inside and a small table.

Leap forward to 1949, and Volkswagen rolled out the Type 2 Microbus, which became a Summer of Love staple and favorite of hippies and Boomer restoration enthusiasts. But it was too bus-like for popular uptake. Just as the first-gen Ford Econoline, though adorable, was too truck-like.

As America moved out of cities and into the suburbs, parents piled kids and groceries into station wagons, which were cash cows for the Big Three. Station wagons were great. They still are. And there should be more beautiful ones in America.

But one cannot deny it is easier to step up while getting into a car rather than down, and easier to step down when getting out. Wagons can’t do this. Minivans can. It is another element of their utterly brutalist utility.

The Plymouth Voyager debuted in 1984 and it took off. The Voyager and sister Dodge Caravan sold 209,000 units in their first year, and sales just kept rocketing upward. The upscale Chrysler Town and Country – there may be, by the way, no more suburban name for any vehicle than “Town and Country” – bowed in 1990. The phrase you heard most often from owners was, “drives like a car.”

The minivan is notable for another reason: It is one of the few vehicles Detroit executed that caused Japan to stumble for years trying to play catch-up, rather than the usual obverse. When foreign automakers saw that Americans wanted minivans, they tried to retool their existing vans, such as the Toyota Van and VW Vanagon. Sales results were predictably poor and did not turn upward until the Japanese began making clean-paper minivans that Americans wanted, such as the Honda Odyssey and Toyota Sienna.

Within a few years of its introduction, the minivan had become so ubiquitous it entered the popular culture. It spawned a demographic cohort – the Soccer Mom – and became shorthand for giving up your cool urban lifestyle for the soul-deadening cul-de-sac. Of course that was wrong – by the turn of the century, American suburbs had become more diverse and integrated than many American cities, which were gentrifying and polarizing.

Despite their extreme utility, list of features and increasing stylishness (once most automakers engineered out the gash on the side for the sliding side-door track), it’s probably wrong to say that most minivan buyers were enamored of their minivans. In 1998, I wrote a story about minivans and hung out at a dealership to talk to customers. I remember one couple that had settled on a minivan, knew they needed a minivan, knew the minivan was absolutely, positively the correct choice. But even up until the moment they signed the contract for their minivan, they were browsing pictures of SUVs on the lot, because, they said, laughing, they just couldn’t imagine thinking of themselves as minivan people.

Despite, or maybe because of, this perception, minivans enjoyed a few moments of reverse-cool, such as in the 1995 film “Get Shorty,” when John Travolta’s character describes his black Oldsmobile Silhouette as “the Cadillac of minivans” and wows Danny DeVito’s character with the remote-control sliding side door.

A Dodge Caravan has a star turn during a car chase in the 2005 Brad Pitt-Angelina spy spoof “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” One beat after a villain steps from a speeding car into the Caravan through one of its sliding side doors, Pitt’s character grabs him and tosses him out of the other side’s sliding door. “These doors are handy,” he muses.

It’s safe to say that minivans were to the 1980s and 1990s what SUVs became to the past 20 years – the must-have American vehicle. So there’s a cruel poetry to the fact that it was the SUV that killed the minivan. Well, if not killed it, certainly usurped it.

But the minivan abides. Fiat Chrysler sold 270,000 minivans last year. That’s not nothing.

It is another characteristic of its persistent practicality that the minivan stubbornly refuses to roll quietly into the junkyard of automotive fads. It’s an elegant turn that a minivan, the Chrysler Pacifica (which, by the way, is a lovely design with some killer interior features) was chosen for Waymo’s autonomous vehicle testing. This puts the humble minivan on the cutting edge of the automobile industry.

And this should come as no surprise – without the need for a steering wheel and a pilot cockpit, more and more autonomous vehicle concept cars are resembling spacious minivans or, perhaps, even, rolling salons. Perhaps by 2036, the 100^th anniversary of the Scarab, we’ll be riding around in autonomous minivans that don’t look too different from what Mr. Stout envisioned.