Ancient Willys Jeep Beats Humvee in Off-Road Test, and It Wasn't Even Trying

Loyal as a dog, strong as a mule, and agile as a goat, the Willys MB – the world's most famous Jeep and the instantly recognizable automotive symbol of the Second World War – is still a marvel of engineering. It’s also a very capable off-road vehicle, even some 84 years after the original design was translated into a fully working vehicle by Willys-Overlander, Ford, and Bantam.

No single piece of military hardware is as iconic as the original Jeep – not even the amazingly popular jet fighters like the F-16 Falcon, the F-18 Hornet, the F-22 Raptor, or the F-35 Lightning. The U.S. Army Truck, 1⁄4‑ton, 4×4, Command Reconnaissance Vehicle (the official designation in the Ordnance Catalogue of the US Army) was the motorized equivalent to the Swiss Army knife.

Some four decades after the original army jeep broke ground, the Army issued another four-wheeled icon of warfare, the HMMWV (pronounced ‘Humvee,’ just spelled weird. No, I’m joking. It stands for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, and it was just as identifiable with the first Iraq war as the cruise missile and the fighter jets taking off from aircraft carriers.

The two vehicles are worlds apart in nearly every aspect, even though they both have four wheels and an engine in the front and were designed to carry soldiers on the battlefield. But the day's question is, ‘Which is the better vehicle off-road?’ After all, neither was conceived with paved transportation routes in mind.

The little Jeep and the massive Humvee are incomparable in every technological aspect – after all, the original design for the former was handed over to the Army in 49 days. Not as a set of drawings or blueprints; no, that would have been too easy. The Army demanded a working prototype within seven weeks of issuing the request.

The Willys Jeep was rugged, genius-simple, and absurdly all-purpose – from plow tractor to aircraft tow truck, it did everything in the war. A small four-cylinder engine (2.2 liters) developed a measly 60 hp (54 net), all sent to all four corners via a two-range transfer case coupled to a three-speed manual transmission. And that’s about it. It didn’t have a roof, doors, or any power equipment.

The windshield wipers were hand-cranked, believe it or not – imagine doing that in the rain and having to shift gears, turn the wheel, stay on the ground (that bit was optional), accelerate, dodge bullets, and not get killed by the German machine guns firing at you. No wonder Enzo Ferrari called the Willys Jeep ‘America’s only real sportscar.’

The Jeep measured a measly 132 inches in length (3.35 meters) and was a very up-close and personal ride 62 inches wide (1.57 meters). The no-roof variant was 52 inches tall to the top of the windshield (1.32 meters). Even when fitted with a metal sheet over the seats, the Jeep only reached 70 inches (1,77 meters). The package weighed just 2,453 lb (1,113 kg)—about the same as a modern-day household lawnmower.

Conversely, the Humvee is a bit larger – about two-and-a-half times heavier (5,900 lbs / 2.7 tons) and vastly more space-intensive. The military rhino of a truck is some 15 feet long (4,57 meters) and sits on a wheelbase of almost eleven feet (3.3 m). That’s the entire length of a 1940-issue jeep stretched between the portal axles of the younger off-roader.

Also, the eight-decade-old war machine could easily sit in the bed of a Humvee since the latter’s width is an inch over seven feet (2.16 meters). The Willys has a wheelbase of just 75 inches (1.9 meters). Heck, it could even be stacked on the roof of the Humvee and used as a rescue vehicle for the four crew of the modern-age military vehicle.

Why so? Because the massive 6.5-liter Diesel V8 gives up and leaves the truck for dead in the middle of a mild off-road test. 190 naturally-aspirated horsepower (the lack of turbocharging explains the low output of the massive eight-cylinder), all gone in an instant. Play the video below to see how much (or how little) did the Humvee achieve in this dirt trial.

The YouTubers from TFLclassics took one of each to the RAM offroad park in Colorado Springs and put them through their paces. Suffice it to say the old-timer won – the Humvee forfeited badly upon running out of fuel. The HMMWV-seasoned veterans vividly recall the fuel gauge (which indicated a sufficient amount of diesel to complete the vlogger’s testing session) as ‘more of a suggestion powered by hopes and dreams.’

The issue was the injection pump. With the truck steeply angled on the climb, the pump was starved of fuel and refused to work further. That’s one major difference between the original military Jeep and its descendant that first came around in 1983. A Willys jeep could be repaired just about anywhere with minimal tools and parts – that’s why it turned into a very popular civilian vehicle after the war.

In fact, just before the federal government banned the Army from selling left-over jeeps to civilians in the early seventies, surplus cars could still be ordered in their shipping crates for the exorbitant price of $100. On the other hand, the civilian version of the Humvee, the Hummer H1 (the real Hummer), never reached the universal acclaim of the 1940 tiny truck.

The Civilian Jeep eventually became one of America’s most recognizable automobiles ever, spawning an entirely new class of vehicles. Although unmistakable, the Hummer only managed to attract polarizing attention, eventually ending up in the archives as an impractically big but very American motor creation.