The last one alive…that’s a statement that carries some serious weight. A one-of-one build simply means rare. The last one means that there were more, and most of them are simply gone, never to return. In the world of cars, we’re getting to the point where that’s a legitimate thought. In the UK, for example, you can track how many examples of a vehicle are left by plate number, so at any given moment in time you can see how many Opel Calibras are still around as an example.
Caring about how many older vehicles are left is a relatively recent phenomenon. Excepting the exceptional vehicles, most were used, abused, thrown away and left to die in fields and yards, or were uncerimoniously scrapped out when their usefulness had run out and the repairs were going to simply be too much to bother with. And what about those machines out in the field, left to the elements? At which point do they become unrecoverable?
When the guys at Turnin’ Rust stumbled upon this 1940 Chevrolet Dubl Duti cargo van, it was exactly as I would expect any old Texas vehicle to be: heat-cooked, intact but certainly far gone. They’re bent on restoring what they believe is the last example of it’s kind, We’re watching this one simply because they are going off of minimal knowledge about these machines and there really isn’t a build plan you can refer to. This could be really cool.
