News about Volkswagen’s plan to revive the International Harvester Scout as a new EV brand called Scout Motors first surfaced in May 2022. The company revealed sketches and announced the production of the new pickup and SUV scheduled to start in 2026. A recent brand-building video has now hinted that we will have our first look at the Scouts this summer.
There is a Scout in All of Us
As the Scouts still won’t be going on sale for another few years, the vehicles to be revealed this summer are likely to 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 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 motors 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 the company’s engineering partnership with Magna-Steyr to help develop the EVs (potentially with an investment of $500 million), though Magna, the company that builds the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, won’t be assisting with production.