Stout Scarab

The Stout Scarab is a 1930–1940s American minivan designed by William Bushnell Stout and manufactured by Stout Engineering Laboratories and later by Stout Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan.

The Stout Scarab is credited by some as the world's first production minivan, and a 1946 experimental prototype of the Scarab became the world's first car with a fiberglass bodyshell and air suspension.

Stout, then president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, had met Buckminster Fuller at a major New York auto show and written an article on the Dymaxion Car for the society newsletter.

Stout designed the Scarab in strong contrast to contemporary production cars that commonly used a separate chassis and body; with a long front, with engine compartment and engine located longitudinally behind the front axle, and a rearward passenger compartment. The front-mounted engine typically drove the rear axle through a connecting drive shaft running underneath the floor of the vehicle. This layout worked well, but had space limitations.

Instead, the Scarab did away with the chassis and drive-shaft, to create a low, flat floor for the interior, by using a unitized body structure, and by placing the Ford-built V8 engine in the rear of the vehicle. The car’s creator, motorcar and aviation engineer and journalist William B. Stout, envisioned his traveling machine to be an office on wheels. To that end, the Scarab's body, styled by John Tjaarda, a well known Dutch automobile engineer, closely followed the construction of an aluminium aircraft fuselage.

...
Wikipedia