Every spring, Jeep rolls out a treasure basket’s worth of deliciously awesome concept cars at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, before packing them up and shipping them to the annual Easter Jeep Safari off-roading bonanza in Moab, Utah. This year, Jeep’s crop of Moab concepts didn’t disappoint, but this incredible military-themed, Wrangler-based Staff Car concept is reducing us to blubbering, slobbering idiots. Can someone get a drill sergeant over here, stat? We need someone to slap us out of it.
Modeled after a World War II–era “staff car”—the usually open-topped vehicle officers and generals were shuttled around in—the concept barely resembles the four-door Wrangler Unlimited that lies beneath. That’s probably because the term “four-door” doesn’t really even apply. There aren’t any doors. Instead, there’s a long void in the body side where people can simply slide in and out of the front and rear cloth bench seats. This is, we believe, especially useful for those times when you need to get out of the thing right freakin’ now. Like, perhaps, when a grenade is tossed your way. Speaking of grenades, the Staff Car comes with one of those; it stands in for the (manual!) shift knob, and we’re pretty sure it’s been decommissioned.
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Jeep’s designers had a new roll cage welded in, and it stretches from the back-seat area to the windshield header. There’s no B-pillar, which is just the coolest. Nearly every visible surface inside and out was painted a desert-beige color that was, according to Jeep, inspired by the color of a certain cardboard box that caught a designer’s eye. The wheels are potentially the raddest-looking steel rims ever fitted to a modern Jeep, and they’re wrapped in genuine 35-inch Firestone NDT (non-directional tread) military tires. (Side note for current Jeep owners: These tires are available to civilians, and on several websites we found them on sale for just $127 apiece. If we had a Wrangler, it’d have this wheel/tire package.) Details like the blackout lights, flat fenders, and rear-mounted spare tire and jerry can were inspired by the original military Jeep, and we were told the seats lack headrests because “the original Jeep didn’t have ’em.”
We love it when form prevails over function, although it is worth noting that General George S. Patton ultimately succumbed to injuries sustained when his Cadillac staff car was involved in a minor crash with another military vehicle and his head hit a glass partition in the vehicle. Had that car had headrests, Patton might’ve lasted a bit longer into the postwar period. But that’s neither here nor there—we’d gladly trundle around off-road or through town in a Jeep built out like this Staff Car concept. It’s just so flagrantly misaligned with today’s production-car realities and its detailing so incredible (look at the whip antenna, the shovels, and the “WR/4-N-GL.3R” vehicle I.D. tag on the hood) we have to love it.