Meet The World’s First Minivan: 1932 Stout Scarab Prototype

Story Cars
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Meet The World’s First Minivan

1932 Stout Scarab Prototype

When people think about the first minivan, they usually picture the Plymouth Voyager or the Renault Espace from the 1980s.

But the basic formula for the modern minivan already existed more than fifty years earlier.

It was called the Stout Scarab.

Designed by William Bushnell Stout and completed in 1932, the Scarab prototype completely rethought how cars were packaged. At a time when most automobiles still followed carriage-era proportions with long hoods, separate chassis designs, and cramped passenger cabins, the Scarab focused almost entirely on interior space and passenger comfort instead.

The engine was moved to the rear. The floor became flat. The cabin became the centerpiece of the vehicle.

The Scarab used a rear-mounted Ford flathead V8 paired with a custom transaxle layout that eliminated the driveshaft tunnel running through the middle of the cabin. That allowed Stout to create an open interior unlike anything else on the road at the time. Rotating passenger seats, a removable table, and flexible seating arrangements made the Scarab feel more like a mobile lounge than a traditional automobile.

And visually, it looked decades ahead of its era.

Styled by John Tjaarda, the Scarab used smooth aircraft-inspired streamlining and a one-box silhouette that foreshadowed modern MPVs and vans long before those categories existed. The design looked bizarre in the early 1930s because almost nothing else on the road remotely resembled it.

The engineering underneath was equally advanced.

The Scarab featured unit-body construction and independent suspension at all four corners during an era when most cars still relied on rigid axles and separate frames. The suspension itself even drew inspiration from aircraft landing gear, reflecting Stout’s aviation background.

The Scarab also emerged around the same time as radical transportation experiments like the Dymaxion Car from Buckminster Fuller. But while the Dymaxion remained largely experimental, the Scarab proved far more practical and usable in real-world driving.

Still, the public didn’t know what to make of it.

The Scarab looked strange, cost roughly $5,000 during the Great Depression, and challenged nearly every accepted idea of what a luxury automobile was supposed to look like. Only nine Scarabs were ultimately built.

But the ideas survived.

Over the following decades, the same passenger-first packaging philosophy would reappear in vehicles like the Volkswagen Type 2, Fiat 600 Multipla, the Renault Espace, and eventually the Plymouth Voyager.