You may have driven the first Dodge Caravan if you are a millennial. It was 1984 when Chrysler released the first generation of the Caravan. It quickly became one of the most famous family cars in the country and was also the first American minivan as we know it today. But GM almost beat Chrysler to the market with the Chevrolet Nomad II, a minivan that came out five years before Chrysler. Chevy made the Nomad II idea in 1979. It was a sleek-looking people mover based on GM’s front-wheel-drive X-Car platform, which was also used by the Chevy Citation and Buick Skylark at the time. There isn’t much information from GM about the car, but it does have one picture of the Nomad II that it sells as a painting. GM would have had a hit on its hands if the Nomad II had been made. The American people wanted minivans when they didn’t mean to, and this car looked much better than the minivans that came after it. The top of the Nomad II was lower, and the shoulder line was also lower. The wheel arches were flared, and the wheel track was surprisingly wide. It looked like a strong truck, but it had more room for people. It didn’t look like it had a folding passenger door, which would become one of the best things about the Dodge Caravan. GM’s one picture of the Nomad II shows that the driver’s side only has a front door. On the other hand, the B-pillars and wide rear tire arches make it look like a sliding door couldn’t have been put in on the passenger side. Because of this, it probably had a normal back door. Ford executives pitched the Mini-Max in the late 1970s, so GM wasn’t the first American carmaker to think about making a small family van. However, if it had been built, the Nomad II would have been the country’s first front-wheel-drive minivan. The Nomad II project was canceled, which was a shame, because GM leaders didn’t want it to compete with the sales of their very successful station wagons. Many people would have liked the front-drive Nomad II more because it would have been cheaper and had more space inside than GM’s rear-drive station wagons. The terrible irony is that the Dodge Caravan killed all wagon sales in the US in the end, no matter what make it was. GM sees the irony in that. The description on the poster says, “The Nomad II got very high marks in customer clinics, but it was not approved for production.” After a few years, another company made a car that did well. It looks like someone is still annoyed. Of course, after seeing how popular the Dodge Caravan and all of its badge-engineered versions were, GM made its own front-wheel-drive minivans, but it wouldn’t be until after ten years. The Chevy Lumina APV came out in 1990. It looked like a future vacuum cleaner, which is how it got the name “dustbuster van.” Even though the Lumina did well, GM couldn’t catch up to Chrysler’s well-known and popular cars. Some people may not have thought it was important at the time that GM decided not to make the Nomad II, but it turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes in American car history. For many years, the minivan market was one of the hottest in the United States, and GM may have been the first company to make one.
