Early minivans were deliberately sized to fit through a garage door
In the late 1970s Chrysler set out to build a small, affordable van that drove like a car. Its 1984 Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan stood six feet tall or less so they would fit in an ordinary garage, and within a few years they had displaced the station wagon as America's family car.
The idea had older roots. The 1936 Stout Scarab is often called the first minivan, with movable seats that let passengers sit around a table and a single central door. Germany's DKW Schnellaster, built from 1949, already had front-wheel drive, a flat floor and flexible seating. Volkswagen's Type 2 put a bus body on Beetle underpinnings, and once it gained a sliding side door in 1968 it had nearly every defining feature. The word itself appeared in 1959, in Britain for Austin's small van based on the Mini, but stayed rare until the 1980s.
Chrysler's formula of front-wheel drive, a low flat floor and a sliding rear door arrived in the same model year as Renault's Espace in Europe. Rivals scrambled. General Motors and Ford answered with rear-wheel-drive designs, then mostly switched to front-wheel drive in the 1990s. Honda's 1995 Odyssey solved a common complaint, heavy rear seats that were a struggle to remove, with a third row that folded into the floor, and by 2002 every minivan offered sliding doors on both sides.
Sales peaked in 2000 at 1.4 million in the United States, when domestic models often cost less than midsize saloons. By 2013 they had fallen to about a third of that, and market share slid from above 6 percent in 2004 to roughly 2 percent by 2019. Crossovers and SUVs took over, helped by the minivan's image as a vehicle for older drivers and soccer moms.
The response has been to go upmarket. North American models now stretch about 200 inches with V6 engines over 270 horsepower for towing, some offer captain's chairs, and in Asia minivans are often sold as luxury cars.
Source: Minivan
