The last hurrah of reasonably proportioned four-wheel drives occurred in the 1990s, as Japanese automakers accustomed to building to the smallish scale of the country’s narrow rural road systems unleashed a final wave of small-to-mini people movers.
In a true example of form following function, its modest footprint was designed to be easily transportable to wherever troops were staged, not to mention capable of shimmying past tight obstacles down the narrowest of paths as it scouted out enemy terrain. The original Willys Jeep, for example, which launched the entire sport-utility trend in the years following World War II, would have cowered in the long shadow of the current Wrangler. The fetishization of ever-larger SUVs in modern times obscures the fact that pint-size 4x4s have an extensive and important history of their own.
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