Last month, my wife, Sheryl, learned that one of my dream cars is a Grumman Long Life Vehicle (LLV). If you’ve received a piece of mail just about any time in the past nearly four decades, chances are your mail carrier rolled up in one of these white trucks. These machines are an icon of the United States Postal Service and arguably as tied to the image of America, much like the Wienermobile or the Corvette. The LLV is an imperfect creation–one that drivers get baked in during the summer–but all of us at the Autopian are in love with them. I’m sure we’d eaxh take one if a bunch ever came up for sale. Personally, I’d love to take an LLV and make it a mobile motorcycle garage, or perhaps a tiny camper. I’d love to just drive the little guy around, foot hanging on the propped-open sliding door’s sill like I’m driving a Jeep. Heck, these would probably be pretty fun Gambler 500 vehicles, too. Sadly, right now it seems difficult to find these trucks for sale. Seeing my disappointment in not finding any to buy, Sheryl set Facebook to notify her whenever one came up for sale. One popped up yesterday, and it’s different than you’d expect.
Posted on the public Grumman Olson Kubvan Owners Facebook group yesterday is an LLV that at first sight looks pretty mint. It wears a body cleaner than some of the trucks currently in service and the seller claims that it has just 27 miles on its odometer. Then things immediately get weird. The seller says that under the aluminum body is not the Chevrolet S-10 and Iron Duke that would normally be there. And there isn’t the later LN2 four-cylinder, either. No, under the hood of this truck is an Isuzu 6VD1 3.2-liter V6. And the chassis? A code engraved on it suggests that the box is riding on an Isuzu Rodeo’s chassis.
As the Smithsonian National Postal Museum writes, when the United States Postal Service needed new vehicles, it used to choose an off-the-shelf vehicle. If you’ve read David’s work for long enough then you’re aware of the Jeep Dispatcher, a little mail-hauling Jeep that served postal duty for many years. When the 1980s rolled around, the USPS was looking to replace the Dispatcher, and this time, the postal service wanted to do something different. Postal officials sought to create the perfect mail truck, and gave manufacturers these requirements, from the Smithsonian: Three finalists were chosen from Grumman and General Motors, Poveco, and American Motors. And those finalists were subjected to some torturous endurance testing: In the end, Grumman won out, and the Chevrolet S-10-based Long Life Vehicle went into service starting in 1987. The LLV was a smashing success for Grumman, so much that in 2011, the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted that there were about 141,000 of them still in service. And those trucks are running on those old S-10 bones.
In a 1987 issue of Grumman World, Grumman Allied Division President Ron Peterson told the paper that Grumman was brewing up a commercial version of the LLV. The commercial version was going to be different from the USPS version by having a choice of options like paint schemes. It wasn’t even going to be built in the same factory. It looked like this truck was going to be the spiritual successor to the Volkswagen-powered KubVan. In that interview, Peterson noted that Grumman had built prototypes based on an Isuzu chassis. Sure enough, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1986, Isuzu and Grumman entered into a partnership to create walk-in delivery trucks. [Author’s note: A previous version of this story noted that Grumman was looking to create a sports car. As it turns out, I got caught up in one of Jason Torchinsky’s weird completely made-up histories. You got me again, Jason!] Alright, so is this a prototype for that venture? Well, I’m not sure. When you look at the engine under the hood of this LLV, it’s clearly an Isuzu V engine from the 1990s. And when you look at the underbody and pull the code etched on the frame (UER25FW-4110361) you’ll get results for the Isuzu Wizard, which was sold in America as the Rodeo.
Look at another picture and you’ll find a control module with “8093657690” and “3.2L” printed on it. That suggests that the engine is an Isuzu 6VD1, an engine used from 1992 to 2002 and one of the engines that was available for the Wizard/Rodeo. The Isuzu parts continue inside, where you’re presented with parts of a Rodeo’s dashboard, steering wheel, and shifter. This particular dash design was introduced during 1995. The seller thinks that this is a prototype from 1998 or 1999, making it younger than any normal LLV. If true, that means that this truck has 205 HP going to its rear wheels, far more than the about 90 ponies offered in the USPS LLVs.
Well, at one point it may have had that much power. While there’s just 27 miles indicated on the odometer, the engine apparently has a bad knock. So, it’s living on borrowed time. It’s unclear why this engine is in such bad shape. A few of us in the Autopian office tried to figure this truck out. We’ve found that the LLV’s wheelbase (100.5 inches) is shorter than the 106.4-inch wheelbase of the 1998 Isuzu Rodeo. Older Rodeos have two additional inches of wheelbase. And just for another comparison, the Amigo, a sibling of the Rodeo, rode on a 96.9-inch wheelbase in 1998.
Looking closer at the pictures, it looks like this truck is ever so slightly longer in the middle than a regular LLV. For an unscientific test, I counted the number of rivets between rear wheel well and the door. A regular LLV has seven, but this has nine. It seems that the LLV body was stretched to fit the longer Isuzu wheel base. And considering how well done it is, I think that this was a factory job. This truck is seemingly a decade newer than Grumman’s plan to enter into the commercial market. I tried to find some sort of explanation for its existence, but have come up empty. Grumman wanted to sell the LLV to commercial delivery operators, but it seems that this didn’t go as planned. Is this a second attempt to enter the LLV into commercial market? This is where you sleuths may help us. Do you know anything about this truck? If so, we want to know! Otherwise, you can pick it up for $3,500 from the seller in central Pennsylvania. The little truck was listed once back in August without any bites. This time, it seems LLV fans want it. So if you want it, you might have to move fast. (Photos to the seller unless otherwise noted.) Inexplicably, the regular folks in Africa seem to be immune from those “shaking car” symptoms. They’d drive on the rough roads for hours at end between the towns with no “complaints”. I suppose it’s different when your life depends on transporting the cargo and people for wages. Another possibility – ex-Grumman employee who worked on the original program in the ’80s, was pissed it was cancelled, and decided to homebrew his own version later. Also – Ford and Utilimaster partnered around this time to built a run of postal delivery vehicles called the FFV, delivered ca. 1999-2002, which used a Ford Explorer chassis – superficially similar to the LLV, but with a longer wheelbase and different front end with bigger quarter windows. Is there a possibility that some of this body might have come from one of those? Maybe the box behind the seat. It’s a shame, I always thought the LLV would make an awesome Snap On Van or an awesome motorcycle van. The story I’ve heard from the folks internally is that they actually did all of the work on that on their own (long before that supposed contract) to give them a modern drivetrain and had a drop-in conversion kit ready to go to sell to USPS, but USPS didn’t want to upgrade them, so the whole project got scrapped and was just chalked up as a loss. In the early 00’s they were experimenting with different cube-shaped vehicles to try to convert them into an “LLV-lite”, but that never went beyond a personal project of one of the Wheeler boys, as far as I know. USPS appears to be taking the UPS approach to the LLV. On my infrequent runs to the non-automotive scrap yard there’s always a pile waiting for disposal. the oil only fix for the issue is to remove the pistons and manually widen the drain-back channels, and add a couple more as well. As far as I know, no one makes an aftermarket piston for these engines that addresses the issue. https://youtu.be/y3g2p4KKS74 Grumman had some leftover vehicles when the USPS contract was over in 1995. So, they titled them as 1995 Chevy S-10s and sold them to local governments. You can buy and register these ones, but not the USPS ones. Amazing find. This thing’s weird. How many other fake histories am I believing to be true? Did Smart actually sell cars in America?
