We first learned about Volkswagen’s plans to revive the International Harvester Scout as a new EV brand named Scout Motors back in May 2022, when the VW subsidiary showed off some side-view sketches and announced its intentions to produce the new pickup and SUV starting in 2026. Now, thanks to a new brand-building video, we know that we’ll get our first look at the Scouts this Winter.
The newly released YouTube teaser is mostly brand-building fluff, a montage of people doing outdoorsy things with the help of vintage Scouts as a gruff narrator says things like “scouts shun the uncomfortable, ignore uncertainty, laugh at difficult” and “there is a scout in all of us, it’s time to let it fly.” Cheesy as it is, the video fits in with earlier reports that Scout wants to be a wholly American brand, and it’s certainly not as annoying as what we’ve seen from the Big 3. At the very end of the video, text comes on screen that says “revealing summer [Winter in Australia] 2024,” which is the first indication we’ve gotten from the brand as to when the new Scout would actually be shown.
As the Scouts still won’t be going on sale for another few years, it’s likely that the vehicles that will be revealed this Winter will be show cars or prototypes that are close to the final design. The initial sketches showed a big, blocky SUV and pickup truck with overall shapes that are clearly callbacks to the original Scouts, and slightly more recently the brand put out a teaser image of the SUV’s front end shrouded in darkness. Scout’s design team is being led by Chris Benjamin, who previously worked at Mercedes-Benz and led Stellantis North America’s interior design department.
Scout is building a new factory in South Carolina, which should be capable of building 200,000 EVs per year after production starts in late 2026. CEO Scott Keogh recently confirmed to Automotive News that the Scouts will use a newly developed body-on-frame platform that won’t be shared with any other VW Group brands, and the SUV will be revealed first with the pickup coming some months later. Keogh also confirmed he company has entered an engineering partnership with Magna-Steyr to help develop the EVs (potentially to the tune of $US500 million), though Magna — the company that builds the Mercedes-Benz G-Class — won’t be assisting with production.
Illustration: Scout Motors
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