Jeep Gladiator Is Still Being Built ... by Kia

[Jimmyb]

The basic premise of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is that there exists a terra incognita wherein species previously thought extinct survive.

His novel places dinosaurs on a plateau above the Amazon. But for the original Jeep Gladiator—or, more accurately, its military cousin, the M715—the lost world is South Korea.

The Jeep Gladiator was built from 1962 to 1988, a very solid run in its own right (and one that stretched from Jeep’s Willys days into, barely, the Chrysler era). The Kaiser Jeep M715, its military spinoff, had a much shorter run: It was in production from 1967 to 1969.

Bizarrely, its story didn’t end there. Kia Motors picked up a license to build the M715 decades ago, and it continues to build a modified, but still recognizable, version of it called the KM450 to this very day. In terms of production run duration, it’s far and away more successful than the M715.

The KM450 is used domestically by South Korea’s armed forces and also sold to militaries around the globe. Kia also builds an evolved version of the 6x6 M809 dubbed the KM500. Who knew that Kia even had a military division, let alone one building living American fossils!

The M715’s longevity isn’t entirely surprising; effective military systems tend to stick around far longer than their civilian counterparts. Largely ungoverned by consumer taste and trends, they’re often upgraded rather than replaced (backroom deals and pork barrel politics may also have something to do with this, but the argument stands). The B-52 Stratofortress, for example, has been in service since 1955, but we doubt a midcentury pilot would recognize most of the electronics now onboard.

It’s the same here. Gone is the M715’s Tornado inline-six, replaced by the D4Da 3.9-liter inline-four diesel; Kia states 139 hp at 2,900 rpm and just under 275 lb-ft of torque at 1,600 rpm. The KM450 gets a five-speed manual transmission with a two-speed transfer case. We’re curious about what, if any, interchangeability there is between this and the M715; if nothing else, the signature upright foldable windshield, ragtop and sheetmetal (sans grille) has carried over.

Still, the KM450 seems to have succeeded because it’s a rugged and time-tested platform upon which you can drop just about anything. The cargo truck variant can carry 5,500 pounds of stuff and/or 12 armored soldiers, but it can also accommodate everything from an ambulance module to a sophisticated mobile communications center to a rocket-launcher rig.



The KM450 is hardly the only license-built Jeep. Mitsubishi started building Jeeps for military and civilian use in 1953 and didn’t stop until 1998, by which point the resulting vehicles had taken their own interesting and divergent evolutionary path. AIL builds its range of Wrangler-based Storm military vehicles in Israel. Mahindra’s longstanding license to build CJ-type vehicles is at the center of the current Mahindra/FCA brouhaha. The list goes on (and on) from there.

We expect these Jeeps and Jeep-adjacent vehicles to keep trucking along until something better—in terms of ruggedness, versatility, repairability, lifetime operating costs, etc.—arrives. So far, nothing has. But that day may be coming soon, at least for the M715. Since 2016, Kia has been building the Kia Light Tactical Vehicle, or KLTV, with the aim of supplanting the KM450.

For now, though, we can take solace in the fact that the spirit of the original Jeep M715, and the SJ Gladiator upon which it was based, lives on in the unlikely guise of a rugged Korean military truck.