Volkswagen’s hype machine for the new Scout is upping its output, its latest cheer for the battery-electric off-roaders a video called “Back to Work.” The 2:09 clip could be considered a video analogue to the Little Red House, the anonymous brick ranch-style home at the Blythewood, South Carolina site of Scout’s future assembly plant. Both are about history, roots, deep values expressed with plainness and simplicity. And for as cliché and perhaps gimmicky as the house and the video are, in being turned into touchpoints for authenticity, what they represent is true and genuine.
As a sign of hype to come, the video includes a line about Scout being “The first SUV, before Bronco, before Blazer, before anybody.” Which is also true. Jeep isn’t mentioned, but Jeep didn’t have an SUV before the Scout, only the CJ-5, which was a World War II Jeep given the merest nods to civilian amenities. And overseas makers aren’t included, otherwise models like the Land Rover Series I Station Wagon, the Mitsubishi CJ3 — a knockdown Jeep kit for the Japanese market — would make for lively debate about the claim, so too the Nissan Patrol that was sold in the U.S. for a few years starting in 1962.
Not that battles over semantics and nostalgia matter now. As we said in our piece on the Little Red House, what matters is what Scout brings to market, and all this talk only makes us more keen to see it. If you’re looking for more on Scout’s good old days, though, check out this video from Bart’s Car Stories called “The Actual First SUV.” Yeah, he gives the nod to Scout, too, in layout out a neat and concise overview of International Harvester’s quest to create a “Small 4×4 Unit.” If IH had been as good as marketing as it was at tractors, trucks, and engines, a huge portion of U.S. drivers might today be driving the S4U instead of an SUV.
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