Here He Comes To Save the Day: Mighty Mite is on the Way!

Most people know only of the AMC-Jeep connection in one way: That the former owned the latter for 17 years. More attentive students of military history could make another connection via AM General, which AMC spun off to handle its military contracts. But Kenosha had another equally as strong, but lesser known connection to the military in the M-422 Mighty Mite.

Similar to the original Jeep, a team of Bantam designers whipped up the idea of a light quarter-ton four-wheel-drive truck, and a pair of automakers competed to build it, but in this case, Willys lost out to American Motors, which built the M-422 from 1960 to 1963 with an aluminum body, four-wheel independent suspension and an air-cooled AMC-built 52hp V-4 engine designed specifically for the Mighty Mite.

American Motors produced just 3,922 Mighty Mites in two or three different configurations, which makes the one we found on the Hemmings Motor News classifieds sorta rare. The fact that it’s a short-wheelbase (65-inch) version narrows it down to one of the first 1,045. Just as rare are the included photographs of the air-cooled V-4 in the Mite’s engine bay. Volo Auto Museum in Illinois has the Mighty Mite for sale for $11,998.

By the way, the Mighty Mite is not to be confused with the Mini Moke or the M-151 MUTT, two similar, but completely different, small, independently sprung Jeep-like vehicles with much larger production runs.