The Moke was developed from the BMC Mini by the Mini’s designer Sir Alec Issigonis. The intention of the Moke was to create a cheap and light weight utility vehicle that the British army would be able to transport anywhere easily, even if it meant being dropped out of a aeroplane.

The Moke

While the design of the Moke did meet all these requirements there was a problem that made it unsuitable for the army, and that was its low ground clearance and lack of 4WD. The army was expecting the performance of a Jeep and was not happy with the Moke so they pulled out of the deal.

Undeterred BMC went ahead with the production of the Moke as it was cheap to produce and sell and being based on mini mechanicals the only new part of the Moke was its roughly built body.

Production started on the Moke in 1964 at BMC’s Longbridge plant in England after 5 years of development work. In 1966 Australia started producing the moke too as its cheap price and open body work made it perfect for the Australian environment. In 1968 BMC stopped English production and started importing the Australian version. Australian production stopped in1982 as the Australian public had become board with the Moke and sales had started to dwindle.

In 1983 Portugal resumed production of the Moke, using the tooling imported from Australia. The Portugal’s Moke production lines did stop on two occasions, once when parent company British Leyland ran into financial difficulties in 1984 and again in 1989 when Rover (formally British Leyland) announced the end of Moke production. Fortunately, an Italian company know as Cagiva bought the rights to produce the Moke from Rover and continued production until late 1993.