In Sweden, the minimum age for taking a drivers license is 18 years of age. So, what really is the purpose of this truck? In essence, it’s a loophole vehicle. The seemingly tough rules makes for a great playing field. And what happens when those young at heart meet stiff government regulations? Where others meet limitations they see endless possibilities for artistic output and creative use of cutting and welding. All to make it as unattractive as possible to make an A-traktor conversion in the first place. If a pickup truck was converted, that meant the bed had to be made smaller than originally intended, and the boxed in sections of the bed had to be permanent and inaccessible, making the unused dead space unavailable. The token truck bed is officially made for taking ballast when towing large cargo. In most cases, that meant shortening the body of the passenger compartment or cutting off the entire cargo hold of the vans.Īs the truck is officially made for hauling stuff, a tow hitch is mandatory. If larger cars or vans were converted, the dead space behind the driver and passenger could not be usable in any sort of way, not for people or goods. But a second row of passengers were against the rules, making crew cabs unsuitable. If the intended conversion seated three abreast from the beginning, that was okay, which suited the use of larger truck bodies. Also mandatory was the triangular slow vehicle sign in the back.Īnd there was a kind of flexibly-interpreted regulation, stipulating that the intended use should not be for personal transport, nor for the transport of goods. Above all, the requisite for building on separate frames only was done away with, enabling the use of more suitable unibody donor vehicles. However, top speed was regulated to 30 km/h (18 mph), and there had to be a token truck bed out back that couldn’t be larger than 1.25 square meter, or about thirteen and a half square feet. There was no wheelbase requisite, the rear axles didn’t have to be unsprung, and there was no set axle ratio. The trucks were now called A-traktors, registered as farm equipments. The thing was, in the meantime people had discovered how handy these vehicles could be, and public demand made the government change the regulations in favor of the builders. Seen as a wartime necessity, the thought was that the demand could now be provided for by “real” tractors and trucks. In the middle seventies, the government wanted to phase out the Epa-traktors entirely, but public uproar made the phenomena stay. Virtually every flavor of every Volvo model ever made, someone somewhere has made into an Epa. As most of the Epa’s were Volvo based, Volvo are an almost mandatory brand in these circles. That’s also the usual tell-tale between old school Epa’s and the newer A-traktors, the shortened wheelbase. And even for the Volvo, that meant the frame had to be shortened accordingly. As a side note, the Epa brand of stores gained a notorious reputation for cheap and bad products, and the brand name fell out of fashion so fast the entire chain had to rebrand itself in the early sixties.Īfter the war, the government almost regulated the Epa out of existence, because god forbid, we can’t let people have too much fun now, can we? The rules called for a body on frame, a maximal wheelbase of 225 cm or about 7 feet, an unsprung rear axle, and a 10:1 gear ratio.Īlmost the only car suitable for those conditions during post war society and available in any kind of large quantity was the Volvo PV445, the “Duett”. Figuratively translated to something like the Sears & Roebuck of tractors. The trucks were colloquially called Epa-traktors, named after a chain of low-priced commodities. In modern times, the truck has evolved into something not that different from the Australian “Ute”. The trucks were used in a similar fashion to the original Jeep and the English Land Rover, working on fields or hauling stuff around the farm. Tractors were made out of anything resembling a vehicle, most of them had Ford A or AA origin. So, what did the farmers do? They had to make with what they had, and what they had was trucks. In Sweden before and during the second world war, there was a shortage of tractors and farm equipment. And the history of this peculiar kind of truck was born during wartime shortage. (first posted ) Necessity really is the mother of all invention.
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