Have I asked this before? It’s been bugging me for a long time, so maybe so. 
I just heard another TV commercial in which Chrysler claimed to have invented the minivan. Well, I had a few VW buses long before the Chrysler version was even thought of.
So, why does the VW bus not qualify as a minivan?
Front seats, middle seats, and rear seats. Side doors to the cabin behind the drivers seat. A shape similar to a loaf of bread.
All similarities, so show me any real differences.
Opinions, please. 
Prace,
mangeorge
I think the inventor would be someone that built something like a minivan and called it a minivan. Like the SUV, there is no definitive point of origin. It is mainly a semantic question.
This Wikipedia article on the history of minivan type vehicles is pretty good but it still can’t prove or disprove the claim.
Indeed, these days a Jeep is pretty indistinguishable from a lot of SUVs. (Yeah, yeah, I’m a heathen for saying it…)
To a Brit, the name Minivan would conjure up this image
The larger, multi seated vehicle, would be called a mini bus.
I thought Paramount invented the mini-van. They called it a ‘shuttle-craft’. Chrylser just stuck wheels on the design.
The VW didn’t have a full-size rear door, right? I don’t know if that disqualifies it as a minivan, but it certainly disqualifies it for my use (hauling bikes, trikes and other large items).
The difference is that VW didn’t call it a minivan and Chrysler did.
The earlier models didn’t. As long as the engine was in the back, the largest door was that of the T3 (1979-1992.) The T4 (1990-2003) was the first model with the engine in the front and a full-size door.
Those are kinda cool. I see one around here every once in a while.
I’ve heard that the earty bus and bug shared the same chassis and simply had different bodies bolted on. I’ve had two busses and three bugs, so I looked and it did look like that could be true.
Neither the bus nor the bug were really all that “mini”. People who got in a bug for the first time were usually surprised at how roomy it was. Lotsa headroom.
Here’s a pretty good article on the evolution of the minivan. The author credits the VW microbus as being a minivan.
But I think scr4 makes a good distinction. A minivan should be able to haul stuff. For that it needs a full rear door or hatch. AFAIK that was the big design innovation that Lancia and Chrysler-Europe came up with separately in the 1970s.
Somewhere I heard that previous small vans were engineered by starting with a basic truck core and then modifying into van style passenger vehicles while the minivan started with a passenger vehicle core which was then modified.
Doesn’t answer you question but might be the source of Chryslers claim. At least in the states.
Certainly Chrysler was the first to build a small van which handled and drove like a car. It wasn’t just that it was based on a passenger car (the VW van was based on the Beetle), but that the passenger car had front-wheel drive. Key to the good handling and car-like qualities was the lower floor (and therefore lower center of gravity) that front-wheel drive allowed them to have.
The other two domestic companies’ first attempts to compete (GM’s Astro & Ford’s Aerostar) missed the mark completely, since they had rear-wheel drive and a consequently high cg and more truck-like handling.
If Chrysler hadn’t designed the world’s least reliable automatic transmission, or if, having done so, they’d moved quickly to fix its deficiencies, they’d still be kings of the minivan world. That’s how superior the Chrysler basic design was.
I’ll look it up more when I get home, but I’m pretty sure the Chrysler minivan was actually a Ford concept brought over to Chrysler by Hal Sperlich in 1978, which was taken up and championed by Lee Iacoccoa in 1980/81 after the bailout crisis subsided.
Yes, that’s right. I believe that the Ford concept was rear-wheel drive, though. But at the time, Chrysler was spinning variant after variant off their front-drive K-car platform, so the minivan ended up being K-car based.
That’s Iacocca’s version. Another version (the one I cited) is that Chrysler-Europe and Lancia had separately come up with the same concept in the 1970s. Lancia built a concept version but didn’t go any further, while CE wound up being sold, and their version died. The Sperlich-Iacocca team had enough clout, as well as the right platform (the K-Car) to finally get a practical version built and marketed.
In fairness to Sperling, he DID have the idea while he was at Ford, but never even got it to the concept stage.
Given the number of claims, it seems pretty clear that if Chrysler hadn’t gotten it to market, someone else would have pretty quickly.
Before looking at the cites given … I want to throw out the Chrysler (Dodge?) Voyager that came out early-to-mid 1980s. Remember the Doug Henning commercials? 
The Voyager wasn’t the very first minivan when prototypes and whatnot are considered … but ISTM the Voyager might have been the first minivan to sell in decent numbers.
Then again … the Voyager could perhaps be classified as some other kind of vehicle altogether, as opposed to a minivan. The Aerostars and such sure didn’t look much like the Voyager.
IMHO, the VW vans – all of them – were legitimately vans. Never thought about the “no rear doors” thing, though.
Here’s what I was thinking about – the Plymouth Voyager, the “Magicwagon” (hence the use of Henning in the advertising).
Was the Dodge Caravan around back then? Same vehicle, different marque? The Wiki article suggests so.
The Chrysler version was the Town and Country; Plymouth had the Voyager; Dodge had the Caravan.