I Was Wondering If You Could Count With Grille Slots So I Tried It

That headline is kind of confusing, but I’m not quite sure how else to put it. What I was wondering is if there are enough cars with some number of grille slots where I could actually count to ten with them, like a one-slot grille, then a two, then three, and so on. You know the order. Does that make sense?

I hope so. And I suppose I should define what I mean by “grille slot,” too. So, in my head, a grille slot is an air intake on the front of a car that is not exactly part of a larger, cohesive grille; like, I’m not talking about just divider bars in a full grille, I mean like independent openings, separated either by body metal, or, less preferably but still acceptable, trim like chrome.

Oh, also! Slots must be horizontal or vertical, and not arranged in a grid-like formation, whereupon they become an actual grille.

See what I mean? I think as I start this you’ll get the idea. So let’s get started!

Okay, first up, we have the Ford Edsel, and I think we can count the horse collar/Georgia O’Keefe-ish grille as a one-slot. Yeah, there’s horizontal grilles flanking it, but I don’t have a lot of options here, so I’m counting this as a one-slotter.

BMW’s kidney grilles I think can count as slots, at least when they’re in a format like the one we see on this 2000CS here, free from any surrounding grille. BMW did this a few times, like on the famous BMW 328, for example. There’s modern versions of this that feel a bit less slot-like, but I stand by that these specific kidney versions qualify.

The Crosley Farm-O-Road! I love these tiny jeep-like little machines. With only a tiny 721cc inline-four under that hood, three slots should be plenty of air. These slots look like a trio of friendly sausages.

Four was surprisingly hard to find, and I’m not really sure I’m satisfied with what I found, this SsangYong Korando, which has what one could interpret as four horizontal slots – though I can also see the argument that it just has three bars in a larger grille. If the edges of the dividing bars were flush with the rest of the body, I think I’d be less apprehensive?

Even numbers of slots are harder to find, and four seems to be the number that slot-grille designers want to avoid. So I’ll grudgingly accept this as a four-slot grille.

Five slots, well, that’s comparatively easy. The iconic Postal Jeeps also known as the Jeep DJ or Dispatcher, had an appealingly simple five-slot grille. Five slots also show up on some Mahindra jeep-like vehicles, like the Roxor, before Jeep’s lawsuit made them change it up.

Six slots, being an even number, also proved difficult, but we do have at least one clear representative: the M151 Mutt, sometimes known as the “Vietnam Jeep.” These unibody, independently-suspended machines were originally built by Ford, then Willys and Kaiser and AM General got in on the action.

They feature the less-common horizontal slots, but those count as slots nevertheless.

This is, of course, the most common number of slots, because Jeep has decided that seven is the iconic, Platonic ideal of slots to have on the front of their vehicles. So there’s plenty of seven-slot Jeeps out there and Jeep now considers seven slots as part of their identity, and goes after any other off-roader that dares to pull air in through seven slots with all the vengeance of a leopard who went to law school.

Eight, again an even number, is a bit iffy, I think. The Jeep XJ Cherokee had a grille option with eight sorta-slots, but is this really just a full grille with seven divider bars? The body-colored grille example I have here does feel a bit more slot-like, and if we removed those two interior bars from each slot, it might feel more slot-like. Later XJs went to a more slot-like grille, but by then Jeep had standardized on seven slots, so that’s what that has.

Still, I can’t find any other octoslotters, so this’ll have to do.

Well, hold up: this may count – a 1950-ish Jeepster:

So here I think we have an actual eight-slot grille, but Willys was trying to hide it under those chrome bars! So, do we count it, even if the intent of the builder was to obscure the slottitude of the grille? I’m not entirely sure. I’ll leave the judgement call up to you.

There’s a decent number of 9-slotters, thanks to all of those WWII and early Willys Jeeps, but just to mix it up, here’s another 9-slot example: a Mahindra CJ540. You can think of it as Mahindra’s YJ, with those square headlights.

And finally, we have our 10-slot grille, thanks to the funny-looking front end of the Jeep CJ-10, something very rare here in America, though I did see one in the wild once.

So, we did it! You can count to 10 with grille slots, mostly! This took longer than I expected, and probably was a bad choice for a Cold Start, but too late now!