Ute (vehicle)
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Ute (short for English utility vehicle ) is the Australian (and also common in New Zealand) expression for a special type of pickup .
The special feature of the Ute is that it is built on a car chassis and is therefore not a truck , but a car with an open loading area.
The roots of the Australian Ute go back to the 1920s, when the first roadsters with attached open loading areas appeared. The first Ute to be mass-produced was the Ford Coupé Utility from 1934 . The main Australian Ute models are based on the Toyota Hilux , the Holden Commodore (referred to as the Holden Ute ) and the Ford Falcon ; both were introduced in the early 1960s.
In the USA, too, there were such cars with an open loading area, namely the Ford Ranchero, built from 1957 to 1979, and the Chevrolet El Camino , which existed in the model years 1959/60 and from 1963 to 1987 (from 1971 to 1987 also as an identical GMC Caballero ). There, however, the category bears the name Pickup, just like the much larger truck-based models with a loading area ( Ford F-Series , Chevrolet Silverado , etc.). In connection with pickups based on passenger cars, the trade press also liked to speak of carucks (composition of car 'passenger car' and truck 'truck' ).
Such vehicles were also offered in Europe, although these are more of an exception in road traffic. From the Ford Sierra there was the P100 , which is strongly reminiscent of the Utes from Australia because of its shape, from VW there was the Caddy based on the Golf I and from Škoda models based on the Favorit and Felicia .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stefan Robert Weißenborn: Australia's legendary flatbed truck . Article of October 28, 2012 on Spiegel Online , accessed October 28, 2012.