The most common response I get when telling people about my panel trucks is "... a what?" Unfortunately I have yet to find a suitable way to explain it to most people without having to resort to pictures, another use for this site I hope! I usually try to describe it as a deliver van before deliver vans existed... and that usually fails. Next I move on to saying that a panel truck is a suburban without the rear side windows and that one usually works much better than the first attempt. So what is a panel truck? I would assume that since you are on a web site devoted to them, you would already know but for the sake of argument lets say that you do not and so you should keep reading!
A panel truck is a utility truck. Most surviving trucks are pretty abused from their life of service. As the name states, they are first and for most a truck. Above I mentioned trying to describe them as a delivery van, while they are not vans despite the attention panel trucks received from hippies, they do share a few traits with them. Were a van in only a truck in that it has a truck chassis, the panel truck is a truck because of the chassis and because it shares the same front end and engine options as the same era trucks much like SUV's do today. Another characteristic that panel trucks share with modern delivery vans is the enclosed and window-less rear section. This section can be used for any number of purposes and because there are so many options, I will move on.
The history of the panel truck is as old as the horse drawn buggies and probably older. Ever since man figured out how to move items without doing themselves there has been something like a panel truck. With the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile that remained as true as ever. Throughout the history of the automobile that have been at lest two, possibly three, categories. Cars and Trucks go back as far as the automobile, though early on the differences were often few. Some of the earliest panel truck that I have seen either in photos or face to face are from the "horseless carriage" era. Sometime in the the thirty's, around thirty-five, Chevrolet introduced the Suburban, now second oldest name plate in the automotive world and second only to the Ford Crown Victoria. The Suburban was actually nothing more than a pane truck with windows cut into the side panels and a extra row of seats. Technically speaking this was the first SUV... not the Jeep like most will say. For the next forty or so years there was panel truck being made somewhere. The newest Ford model I have see is a 1957 model year and the newest Chevy panel truck I have seen is a 1972 model year. I am sure that Dodge made them into the sixties as well but have only seen examples up to the mid 1950's. Along side the panel truck and the Suburban, in the GMC/Chevy lines anyway, was a third brother called the "Canopy Express." If the panel truck is what delivery vans were back in the day, then the Canopy Express is what ice cream venders sold their product out of back then. In the paneled sides of the truck were cut huge openings that were covered with canvas canopies that could roll up and out of the way for the vendor to pedal his/her goods. I have a couple examples of these trucks in my photo gallery for your enjoyment.
I hope that this has been educational and if you have any revisions for this section
please email me with your corrections and I will edit them in!