Kurogane Type 95

Tetsuji Makita designed it and Ōmori in Tokyo built it, five years before the Americans built the jeep. It is the earliest purpose-designed four-wheel-drive scout car in the registry.

The air-cooled twin was the point. Japan's army expected to fight in Manchuria and in the tropics, and an engine with no radiator has nothing to freeze, nothing to boil and nothing to lose to a bullet. Three bodies were offered — a two-door roadster, a two-door pick-up and a four-door phaeton — and the type served in China and across the Pacific until 1944. Survivors are very rare, which is why the registry has so little imagery for it.