I feel like my list of automotive fetishes grows on a near-daily basis. I’m not really sure what to do about this issue, other than just embrace it and all the taillights and clever packaging and air-cooling and rear engines and on and on and on that go with these obsessions. For example, a recently-realized fetish are hidden storage compartments, which leads me to the El Camino, which has two exciting hidden storage compartments, one more hidden than the other. Let’s investigate.
We all know the El Camino, America’s ute, the car that’s also a truck, in much the same way – and using essentially the same technology – that allowed Campbell’s Chunky Soup to be a soup that eats like a meal. But not “eats” like an active verb, because a soup that actively consumes food is outlawed by the Geneva Convention, you see. The El Camino, being both car and truck, is currently not outlawed by the Geneva Convention, so we’re free to still enjoy these cargo-hauling marvels.
The El Camino is a machine defined by its ability to move and haul stuff. There’s that long bed at the rear, but in addition to that there is also a useful enclosed storage area inside the cabin, behind the driver’s seat. You can see it in this brochure here:
See it down there, on the bottom row, one from the right? That’s the little compartment. The other side has the spare tire, so it’s not the full width of the cabin. Here’s a bit of a closer look:
It’s not huge, but it’s something, and it is nice to have weather-protected storage or lockable storage for stuff you don’t want rained on or stolen, like, I guess, those hard hats there?
So that’s one hidden compartment; the other one is more interesting because it’s unofficial and goes by the name “smuggler’s box,” which is exciting, and makes your El Camino feel like the Millennium Falcon.
Because the El Caminos were built on station wagon frames, the area of the rear bench seat and footwell ended up as a void under the bed floor, and this became the “smuggler’s box.” Normally, this is inaccessible and the only thing that gets smuggled in there is water and then rust, but lots of El Camino owners have transformed it into a usable under-bed storage area.
Like this guy, who made one with a powered lid:
…or this guy, who did a very thorough job:
Really, GM should have made this a waterproof and accessible storage area from day one, but GM being GM, I’m not surprised it was just an inaccessible rust trap. Still, where there’s open volumes of space in a car, people will figure out how to use it, and that’s a beautiful thing.
My 1966 Valiant ute has a hidden space under the front of the bed floor like this, but one major difference (like Project Cactus) is that the bed continues forward a fair way past the back window and under the parcel shelf. In mine I will be adding a vertical bulkhead below the back window with an access hatch to a sealed compartment in the middle where I plan to put the battery. On either side there will be a hidden storage compartment accessible by a hatch hidden behind the seat backs – the seats are already early BMW 3-series buckets with a headrest delete, chosen because they are from a 2 door model and have convenient levers on the side to flip the seat backs forward for access to the compartments.
El, Camino… El, El, Camino.
The front is like a car and the back is like a truck.
The front is where you drive and the back is where you
Vinyl top on a pickup. LOL. So business out front, party out back and toupee in the middle.
Thanks Torch, now I really want to add a “smugglers box” to one of my vehicles.
Did Project Cactus have one too ?
I’m sure it had plenty of inaccessible rust traps
No ‘smuggler’s box’ on a Valiant ute, as stated above by MorganGT the load floor extends further on them so that you can fit two spare tires behind the seats.
Check out the article DT wrote when I picked up Cactus and you can see what I mean: https://www.theautopian.com/i-now-own-a-parts-car-in-australia-i-have-officially-peaked-as-a-human-being/
That station-wagon floorpan even had the back-seat bottom cushion clips spotwelded in place. When the plastic liner in my ’70 El Camino (SS-396 red w/ black stripes, still have it) cracked I made that a slide-out tool drawer.
The “smugglers box” made it so that you could not cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. without being pulled into secondary inspection and made to wait there for an hour-plus every time by Border Patrol Agents who had seen some-type training film and thought they were being geniuses and “on to you”. I was even once diverted into inspection at a station 60 miles north into CA to see if I was trying to sneak multiple bottles of booze past them, when of-course at that point it would have been breaking no laws. In any event, when I travelled into Baja often I always just left the screws out of the bed panel to save us all some time.
The Nissan GTR has a small compartment in the passenger’s floor. No one knows its purpose but it looks like a convenient stash box to me.
2nd gen MINI Coopers had a “secret compartment” in the dash. Above the glovebox, you push it in and the lid opens up……
The Ford Escort van had a similar compartment where the load floor extended over the rear foot well. I suspect other car based vans were similar
The high roof Volvo 145s made for the Swedish post office have storage boxes in the raised roof area, and on the topic of Volvo the sedns had two spare tire wells and normally the cars only had one tire, so the unused one was covered by the trunk mat. This could be used as storage as is or Volvo sold a gas can shaped to fit.
Related to this GMT400 trucks are set up to run dual batteries for the diesel models and gas engine models have a plastic storage box in the left hand battery tray
It depends upon what year El Camino. The last generation (78-87), The entire area is accessed from behind the seat. The spare tire fits up under there horizontally on the passenger side, with enough room to shove a suit case on the drivers side. The earlier ones have less access.
Would be cool to see someone turn one of these into a Rivian-style slide-out drawer. That way you wouldn’t have to unload cargo from the bed to access the space.
Once again Torch provides the catch of the day. We had an El Camino when I was a kid and I never knew about the smugglers box. That would have made it the “cool” car of the neighborhood.
“The other side has the spare tire” Sorry, don’t get it. How do you get to the spare tire? Not through the cabin, I bet.
You can see in the photo it’s right behind the passenger seat.
TNX
When I was in high school back in the *cough* mid-80s whenever I was driving with two of my female friends they would scream whenever they saw an El Camino, because they thought they were the ugliest thing on the road. Let’s just say when you’re trying to shift gears in an old Beetle getting screamed at in the ear at an intersection is not a good thing.
Certain high-roof conversion vans have small storage compartments around the top–either with small doors, or with cargo netting. I like the thought of storing emergency supplies or similar in those so they don’t take up otherwise more “usable” floor/cabin space.
I’ll take that orange one with the white top in the top shot, please!
Are you nuts?!? Yellow SS FTW!!!
Can’t resist orange, or 2 tone paint. This has both.
Also, yes, I’ve been told many times I’m nuts. I’ve decided to embrace it.
Torch, if you dig storage compartments, check out the XV30 Camry. My kid just bought one, and I am amazed at the storage opportunities hidden all over the cabin. It would be hard to bring enough things to fill them all!
The de-utification of America is national shame. Shame, shame, shame.
Isn’t the Maverick a Ute?
To me, no, given its SUV roots (ditto Santa Cruz). But since SUVs and crossovers have virtually eliminated the sedan/wagon classes in the US, I’ll concede these are as close we get, today.
A while back there was a story on some nifty Dodge Charger ute conversions, and some mention and/or pictures of how the rear footwell area got closed-up under the conversion bodywork. I was thinking that was kind of unfortunate; there ought to be a way to keep the space accessible as a storage bin, or at least a better way to cut it out so that it would accumulate moisture and rust out someday.
After all, the El Camino was a popular ute in its day, and GM’s expert designers would have found a way around such a problem, right?
Right??
(Announcer Voice)
“They didn’t.”
Even with all the different utes being developed in australia over the years, pretty much all of them had the same old smuggler’s box layout, the only exceptions being the HQ-WB Holdens and the AU-FG falcons, which both had a ladder frame in the rear, so no station wagon floorpan.