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Concept
Cutaway van chassis
Summary
Cutaway van chassis are used by second stage manufacturers for a wide range of completed motor vehicles. Especially popular in the United States, they are usually based upon incomplete vans to be bigger or smaller than pickup trucks and SUVs made by manufacturers such as Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors which are generally equipped with heavier duty components than most of their complete products. To these incomplete vehicles, a second stage manufacturer adds specific equipment and completes the vehicle. Common applications of this type of vehicle design and manufacturing includes small trucks, school buses, recreational vehicles, minibuses, and ambulances. The term "cutaway" can be somewhat of a misnomer in most of the vehicle's context since it refers to truck bodies for heavy-duty commercial-grade applications sharing a common truck chassis.
Following the initial popularity of Volkswagen's imported minibuses, vans made by the domestic manufacturers were developed and became popular in the United States in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, Chrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors were all manufacturing many models of passenger and utility vans. The Dodge passenger vans of Chrysler had a maximum seating capacity of 14 persons plus the driver, and came to be commonly known as 15 passenger vans, joined by similar sized models by the other manufacturers years later.
Conversions for personal motor homes became very popular, drawing the interest of recreational vehicle manufacturers. Based upon that, cutaway van chassis were developed in the early 1970s to accommodate demand for conversions which were heavier and wider than the standard production vans completed by the major auto and truck manufacturers (i.e. Chevrolet-GM, Dodge, and Ford). As they began working on bigger models of their popular light-duty van products, they developed cutaway van chassis solely for use by second stage manufacturers.
Busette, developed by Wayne Corporation in 1972, was the first successful small school bus to be based on a cutaway van chassis with dual rear wheels.
Official source
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