One of the cheapest ways to get a taste of the RV experience is to sleep in a tent hanging off of the back of your car. You can find a variety of car tents today, but the most well-known car tent is the one that you could have strapped to the back of the Pontiac Aztek. But the Aztek was really just a continuation of what came before. Back in the 1970s and before, automakers marketed cars with camping tents and accessories to turn your rides into fun weekend motels.
RV ownership can get prohibitively expensive really quickly. You never just buy your rig and call it a day. RVs are generally maintenance-hungry, require their own registration, require their own insurance, and oh yeah, you have to store the darn thing somewhere when you aren’t using it. In my experience, you just never stop throwing money at an RV.
In recent times there has been a lot of interest in getting some of that RVing experience but without setting money on fire to do it. This is leading to some awesome camping boxes and tents so that you can turn your daily driver into a temporary home. Camping out of your car means you’re not sleeping on the ground in a tent and you can make personal touches to make the experience more fun. I mean, you can use the vehicle’s stereo for entertainment and in a worst case scenario, you can close up the doors for safety and warmth. Who needs a Winnebago when you can make sure your car has everything you need?
Well, that’s the theory, anyway. As David Tracy has shown, if you don’t do it right, your car camping days might be rougher than if you just pitched a tent on the ground.
Back in the 1970s, outdoor recreation was really taking off. The thought of adventuring appealed to many and everyone had their own way of doing things, be it hitting trails on enduro motorcycles or mountain bikes, hiking, kayaking, or just camping out in the wilderness. People were buying 4x4s to have fun in the woods and more people were embracing active outdoor lifestyles.
Some just wanted to buy a camper and chill out at an RV park. The automotive and RV industries were quick to respond to these new trends. Truck-based motorhomes like the GMC Jimmy Casa Grande, the Chevy Blazer Chalet, the Dodge Woodsman, and a bizarre Jeep CJ-5-based coach existed as methods to get families pretty far off the beaten path for a camping weekend while those 4×4 vehicles themselves became more family-friendly than before. Meanwhile, General Motors revolutionized the coach RV with its GMC MotorHome, a design that still hasn’t been matched even today.
But the equipment permitting these adventures wasn’t limited to off-road vehicles or motorhomes. Manufacturers saw demand to turn regular cars into vehicles that people might take on an adventure. In 1973, both General Motors and American Motors debuted their camping solutions.
If you bought something like a Pontiac Phoenix, a Chevy Nova, or really any GM X-platform or H-body hatch, you could equip your car with a tent GM marketed as the Hatchback Hutch.
This tent worked a lot like the modern Pontiac Aztek tent. GM hatchback owners pitched their tent and secured it by strapping it to the car. As Hagerty writes, there were even larger Hatchback Hutch tents for the Chevy LUV mini truck and the Vega wagon, but I can’t even find a single image of such tents. If you’re lucky enough to find one of these tents today, you’d be looking for part number 726903.
GM’s tent reach also spread far and wide to Australia, where the Hatch Hutch was sold as an accessory for the Holden LX Torana hatchback and the Tail Tent hung off of the back of the Torana panel van. By the way, if you are one of our Aussie friends, a company has put the Tail Tent back into production!
Check it out:
It’s not known for how long GM offered this option, but I have found advertisements in 1973 and 1974 at least. I’ve also seen one of these amazing tents in person at the obscure Pontiac-Oakland Automobile Museum in Pontiac, Illinois.
You really do see the roots of the later Aztek tent in this thing.
More is known about AMC’s tent, which was functionally similar to GM’s option. This one was the Hornet Hutch and as the name suggests, it was a tent to hang off of the back of your Malaise Era Hornet and later, the Concord. According to Hemmings, the Hornet Hutch had a part number of 8993019 and was $61.15 of your hard-earned money in the mid-1970s, or roughly $414 today.
Ultimately, AMC would kill off the tent option in 1980, which coincides with around the time when AMC killed off the Concord hatchback. Toyota was also experimenting with car camping and its entry in the 1970s was wild with the 1972 RV-2 concept:
These neat ideas for camping didn’t come out of nowhere. In the past, America’s automakers produced occasional experiments to help people sleep in their cars a little better. Hemmings writes that in the 1930s, a number of companies, most notably Nash, sold cars with seats that folded into beds. However, back in those days, those seats were less an option for recreation and more useful for traveling salesmen during the Great Depression.
By the late 1940s, Hemmings writes, Nash expanded on this concept, selling cars where the entire seating areas folded flat. Toss in the optional mattress and window screens and your Nash was the perfect weekend getaway vehicle for the whole family.
In 1959, Ford went properly nutty with the Country Squire Station Wagon “pushbutton camper” concept, which deployed a tent, a boat, and a kitchen at just the push of a button. There was also the Unitron concept, which was produced in the same decade and was supposed to be a sports car of sorts, an RV, and an office on wheels at the same time. Sadly, neither of these Ford ideas went into production.
Perhaps the coolest example of American car camping was the 1960s Chevrolet Greenbrier, where GM sold two different kinds of accessory tents alongside brilliant removable camper van elements. With the use of GM’s accessory catalog, your Greenbrier could have been a work van during the week and a camper by Friday afternoon.
Sadly, it seemed these tent ideas slowly died off for a while. Hemmings suggests that the 1968 Pontiac Bonneville might have had an option for a trunk-based camping setup, but I couldn’t find anything of the sort in accessory brochures. One automaker that continued the tent tradition later on was Chrysler. Its early minivans already had seats that folded into beds, but the company also introduced the Magic Camper Package tent in 1985 for its minivans.
Even that didn’t last.
GM did bring tents back with tents for the Aztek, GMC Envoy XUV, and Chevy Avalanche. Honda also got in on the fun. And today, you can buy a tent for everything from the Tesla Cybertruck to your Porsche as car camping is still very in right now.
All of these ideas, no matter how short-lived, gave enthusiasts on multiple continents a cheaper way to go camping without sticking yourself on the ground or buying a coach. Why buy an RV that you have to keep dumping money into when your trusty daily can be the perfect camper for just a weekend? I hope manufacturers keep these hutches coming.
(Images: Manufacturers, unless otherwise noted.)
My parents had a Corvair Greenbrier Camper!!
This was before my time, but I’ve seen pictures of it. They took it to Alaska and back on the Alcan Highway sometime in the late 60s.
“At today’s accommodation rates it pays for itself in a week or less!”
The Toyota RV-2 and the Ford Country Squire look like something the old Top Gear would have done for an RV Challenge.
East Germans had mastered the high art of setting up the tents atop Trabants. Those are called Dachzelt (roof tent) and are packed in the purpose-built box containers attached to the Trabants.
This 1981 video shows how the East Germans set up Dachzelt. One disadvantage of Dachzelt atop Trabant is the vigorously copulating movements inside the tent are magnified greatly, rocking and shaking Trabant and Dachzelt for all to see…
So how was your night’s sleep?
Short and in tents.
I see you used the Toyota RV-2 SFW set of photos from the Penthouse shoot. The entire set includes the same car in the same locale with male and female models in various stages of undress.
Maybe that Pontiac Phoenix is where the DC Sniper got his inspiration from.
I was a kinda huge deal in the 70’s too. You should see the tux I wore to the prom!
My uncle had a LX Torana Hatch with the “Hatch Hutch” in full 70’s spec brown on brown on brown.
Minor correction in the story above – it’s not a “Torana Panel Van” but rather a “Kingswood Panel Van”. The Torana was built on a mid-size GM platform with only sedans and hatches, whereas the Kingswood was Holdens full-size platform that offered sedans, station wagons, utes, panel vans (aka the shaggin wagon) and a cab/chassis ute with a flat tray colloquially known as the “one tonner”.
Why are Sonny and Cher camping in a Vega?
I enjoy this as a great example of automotive things that buyers like in theory, but are never actually willing to purchase in any reasonable number, so they become a trivia item or ebay find later on.
I’m sure there’s a valid reason why not, I’ve always wondered why not just do similar to the VW thing (the Trek edition!) – up the price a little and throw it in for free on all of them?
They might actually get used more that way vs people having to actually select it as an option. “Your Voyager is ready for adventure, standard!”
Tail Tent. My prude American mind immediately went there. Then again, these are the same people who use the four letter “c” word as a term of endearment. And find a drain jetting business called Penetrator as perfectly normal. Just another sign that just because we all speak English doesn’t mean we really understand each other…
Glamping in the 70s was not drowning inside your giant canvas wall tent when it rained.
The caption on the image for this entry reminds me of the “tent lovers” from The Road Warrior:
https://youtu.be/wNzfgl_H5vA?t=190
Actually hanging out in the mountains in a Vega (or other) hatchback with a blanket thrown over the top, or a tarp in the rain, and maybe with two cars backed up to each other, and an adequate supply of either things that were legal but not anymore, or things that were illegal and aren’t now, seemed perfectly acceptable to the more-adventurous girls of the time. Glad to have been from the era.
I am fairly certain Jason stopped throwing money at his RV.
It’s becoming one with nature now. I sort of want to go into it, respirator and all, like an urban explorer.
Maybe you could clean it up for him then split the income from renting it out as student housing.
Now he just throws chainsaws at it…
Pornstache guy to hippie chick: “so what do you think of this groovy tent on my ‘73 Vega, babe?”
Hippie chick: “If you make me spend another night in this Hai Karate soaked dutch oven, I’ll cut you.”
74 at least due to the horrific bumper. The Vega was a good looking design before those were tacked on.
If this Vega with a Hatchback Hutch is a ‘rockin’,
It’s probably about to die from overheating.
Please call a tow truck.