How An El Camino Spin Could Solve The Ford Maverick’s Biggest Problem

Changes over time naturally cause some things to become obsolete. The MTV era made talented musicians without “the right look” unemployable. Sign painters with mad skills and a steady hand couldn’t compete with a digital vinyl cutter. Digital cameras somehow resulted in more people taking more photos than ever, while film and photo paper became museum pieces.

In the same way, the current mass acceptance of pickups as daily drivers combined with “car like” comfort and drivability of most new trucks effectively ended the life of an old favorite: the “coupe utility.”

In a recent Mercedes Streeter post, somebody asked for a revival of one of these: the Chevrolet El Camino. I can actually think of a valid reason for the existence of a reborn model of this icon, so let’s get to it.

White Collar Up Front, Blue Collar In Back

From its beginnings in 1959 to the ultimate demise in 1987, the formula Chevy used was essentially the same: take a full- or mid-sized station wagon and essentially chop off the roof from the “B” pillar back.

However, GM added longer doors and a unique roofline so the El Camino didn’t have the “clipped off” greenhouses of industrial-looking car-based utilities like seventies Australian Holdens or the VW Golf Caddy. The sweeping rear pillars gave the Chevy the style unmatched by anyone except the competitive Ford Ranchero (which preceded the El Camino on the market but stopped production in 1979).

For the last 1978-87 models, Chevy put in a compound curved backlight similar to the rear window on a Ferrari 246 or 308 for an ultra-stylish look. There was even a nearly identical model called the Caballero to give GMC dealers a coupe-ute to sell.

The cabin was just wide enough for the three-person bench option, and GM had a unique use for the footwells of the rear seat on the station wagon that remained in the floor pan. These became “smuggler’s bins” for the spare tire and whatever extra cargo or contraband you want to carry inside. Here’s an overlay of the El Camino on the Malibu wagon so you can see where they were:

Pulling up the vertical carpet behind the seats revealed the hidden trunk space:

The El Camino was never a huge seller, but consistent demand kept the idea going for nearly thirty years. While I think the day of the typical coupe-ute is over, there’s a role that a new type of crossover-based El Camino might play that could combat one of the biggest complaints about the Maverick and the current crop of unibody trucks.

Can You Cut My 4×8 In Half, Please?

We’ve certainly bought into the near-hysteria surrounding Ford’s little Maverick. Here’s a four-door unibody pickup that does nearly everything for everyone: economical to buy, cheap to run, and easy to drive, all with plenty of utility. However, if you had to ask many owners one thing that occasionally disappoints them, it’s the bed size.

Sure, the 54-inch-long bed is par for the course for a compact, but naturally, when you buy a pickup, you inevitably want to do pickup things – but a 54″ bed means that you really can’t. There are bed extender bar structures like below that you can get that flip around to incorporate the space on top of the folded-down tailgate, but that’s a bit of a lash-up solution.

Eliminating the rear seats in favor of more bed space is one solution, but a back seat is non-negotiable for many owners, and a place for two more passengers, even if not the comfiest space, is a must. Still, this doesn’t mean that owners will use the rear bench or buckets every time they drive the truck, especially if they don’t have kids or if the pickup will mainly be used for solo driving to work.

So what are we saying? That a number of potential customers want a pickup with a two-place cab and a decent-length bed that can still give the option of carrying more people with a smaller bed? We can do that. In fact, it’s been tried before.

FUN Is In The Name

There’s a seemingly never-ending supply of cool European vehicles that we never received here in the United States. Some of the most interesting ones came from former Eastern Bloc nations, like the Czech Republic’s Skoda.

Early ones possessed rear engines and commodious frunks (with side-opening hoods, no less), so you can imagine that to occupy that space in our Jason Torchinsky’s newly-repaired heart. Later models became far more conventional transverse front-wheel-drive designs, but that didn’t mean the company wouldn’t occasionally dabble in some strange stuff. One of the oddest had to be the Skoda Felica Fun compact pickup.

Here’s Torch’s very Torchy description of it:

You can think of the Felicia FUN’s innovation as a sort of marriage between two other small-truck funnovations: the foldable mid-gate, as seen on the Chevy Avalanche and Toyota bB Opendeck, and the seats in the truck bed, as seen, famously, on the Subaru BRAT.

The midgate lifts up and back on those hinged rails, grabbed from that big bar, then the seat bottom folds into place, and boom, two more seats! There were even options to add a roof and windows to the back seats:

That’s some real innovation there. When the seats were unfolded, the depth of the loading area decreased from 1,370 to 850 millimeters, but that’s a compromise that buyers accepted. Admittedly, the Felicia FUN was so small that it really didn’t work effectively as either a truck or people carrier like the Maverick and similar products needs to. We can fix that.

Swiss Army Knife With A Spanish Name

As Mercedes Streeter reported, forty years ago a diesel-powered El Camino was seen by GM as an efficient way to offer truck utility with car-like comfort. Potential buyers at the time did not agree at all, but a commenter in the post named Grey alien in a beige sedan wanted to see a revival of the concept with a different kind of efficiency.

Well, I can’t let our readers down, but sadly Chevy no longer has a Malibu mid-sized sedan from which to create an El Camino as in years past. We’ll have to select a crossover electric SUV to use as a starting point, and the mid-sized Blazer EV appears to be our only real choice.

We’ll begin by stretching the front doors and wheelbase a bit, and then adding a bit of overhang in the back. The sweeping rear pillars and sunken rear window I’ve added echo the last 1978-87 El Camino that runs counter to the vertical backlights on all other trucks, while still not compromising bed length.

It looks nice enough with a decent-length bed well over six feet long, but it only carries half the passengers of the vaunted Maverick. Or that’s what you think…

Hey, what just happened? Here’s the party trick: the expandable cabin. You start with the two-seater full-length-bed format:

Next, the rear wall of the cabin moves backwards. Then, the floor at the front of the bed (which is now “inside” the truck) flips up to expose the rear seats. You’ve now got seating for four, and if you open the sunroof up front and roll down the side windows, it’s a bit like a convertible. As with the Felicia FUN, the backlight remains in place behind the rear seats to act a bit like a convertible “wind blocker.”

If the weather turns bad, the trim around the back of the roof and rear pillars slides back as well. As it moves, a convertible fabric top spans the space left open between the roof and relocated pillar trim.

Close the sunroof and front windows, and you now have an enclosed four (or five) seat pickup cab with a shorter, Maverick-sized bed in back. This thing would be never ending fun. Here’s an animation in the side view:

Actually, the fun always eventually stops but it would take a lot longer for the trip to end than in a standard EV since the El Camino could feature a range-extending motor and fuel tank mounted in the void in the overhang behind the rear axle (you can see the seam behind the wheel arches in the bed indicating where the bed floor could lift to access the motor). No, it wouldn’t be a massive engine capable of powering the whole car, but you’d have the peace of mind and diesel-like range possibilities that our reader was likely looking for. Good call, Grey alien!

Maybe It’s An EV Camino?

The El Camino was always a compromise between car and truck, and our new one would have some of the same tradeoffs. If you’re looking for a fully enclosed cabin with four doors to access it and don’t care about a super-short bed, then the Maverick would still be your best choice. Still, why should GM make a me-too competitor when some people out there want more style than the boxy Ford has to offer and occasionally carry things longer than the Mav’s rather dinky four-and-a-half-foot bed can accommodate? I didn’t even mention the convertible-like capabilities of the expandable passenger compartment.

This new EV Camino would either be a massive hit or an abject failure that a fitty-year-old David Tracy will be driving a decrepit example of to Pebble Beach in a few decades on giant gold-rattle-canned wheels. I’m going with the latter as the more likely scenario. Regardless, I really appreciate the suggestion, Grey alien in a beige sedan! Keep them coming!