It’s adorable enough to be a Pixar creation, but the Arkla Handywagon was a real truck, and reportedly, close to a hundred were produced.

It may be impossible to say how many truck manufacturers have operated in the United States. They’re probably countless. In the early years of the industry, many truck makers were small, regional outfits, building vehicles to local order from assembled components, and sometimes, truck fleets even built their own rigs. As the major manufacturers came to dominate the industry, the practice largely died out by the 1940s. But in around mid-1963, the folks at the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company (Arkla) decided that no commercially available truck quite met their needs, so they produced their own: the 1964 Arkla Handywagon.

Ed Handy (left) and Ray Thornton

Witt Stephens, chairman of the natural gas utlity, enlisted his attorney, Ray Thornton, to come up with a basic design, and Thornton then turned to Ed Handy, a company engineer, to execute the project. Their homework must have been extensive, for they found a vehicle virtually unknown in the USA to serve as the mechanical foundation of their truck: the subcompact DAF 750, produced by Van Doorne’s Automobiel Fabriek in the Netherlands. The most remarkable feature of the tiny DAF 750 was its Variomatic transmission system.

The CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) is commonplace across the auto industry today, but in the 1960s DAF was nearly the sole practioner, offering the Variomatic system invented by company founder Hub van Doorne. Here, a pair of V-belts and cone-like pulleys transmitted the power to each of the the rear drive wheels, varying the final drive ratio on the fly via a centrifugal governor. Mounted up front was an air-cooled, opposed two-cylinder engine with 746 cc and 30 hp. It was this engine and drivetrain that Handy and Thornton selected to power the Handywagon.

The trucks were assembled in Handy’s shop in Little Rock, Arkansas, using fiberglass bodies constructed by the Razorback Boat Company in nearby Malvern. The bodywork was designed for easy repair or replacement, but who styled the friendly and likeable front end is not reported. In May of 1964 the first trucks went into regular route and utlity service, where they reportedly met or exceeded all expectations for economy and reliability. Ultimately, 97 vehicles were produced at a rate of around one per day.

In fact, Stephens was so impressed that he asked Thornton and Handy to investigate the possibilities for limited production of the Handywagon. If 1,000 copies could be produced at a cost of $1,000 each, they could set up the first real auto factory in the state. But the true cost was closer to $1,240, they determined, so the idea was shelved. The original run of Handywagons served the company well for more than a decade, and at least three are known to exist today, one in the DAF Museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Far better known for its large trucks than for its tiny cars with belt-drive trainsmissions, DAF operates today as a division of PACCAR.