A short but not unimportant history is described by the chapter 170 V Prischenwagen. Without this variant, there would have been no new production so quickly and the reconstruction would have been more stalled than it was anyway after the war.

Food, clothing, medical products, heating and building materials were all in short supply. The tight transportation situation made it urgently necessary to convert passenger cars into delivery vans. In November 1945, the economic authority of the U.S. occupation zone granted the automaker a production license for flatbed, box and ambulance vans based on the 170 V passenger car. In spring 1946, the license was extended to include passenger cars. In May 1946, a platform truck was the first of 214 vehicles produced that year to leave final assembly at the Sindelfingen plant. The first box van followed in June, an ambulance in September and a police patrol car in October. It can be seen from the numbers produced and the time intervals that production conditions were anything but normal. It was not until mid-1947 that the small utility vehicles were followed by the four-door 170 V sedan.

Only the bare essentials: The vehicles are extremely simply equipped. For example, the interior is very functionally designed, and on the exterior, one looks in vain for chrome-plated parts. This underscores how much this production was about meeting basic needs for transportation and mobility. The prevailing shortage of materials presented additional difficulties. For example, the vehicles were delivered without tires, which the customer had to provide from another source.

The bodywork of the 170 V commercial vehicle variants had to be improvised due to the lack of materials. Sheet metal was scarce. Thus, the spartan driver’s cab was a separate unit consisting of a simple, but at least lightweight, wood-fiber hardboard construction, as was already the case with some trucks in wartime. Sliding windows were used as side windows, and the doors were locked with simple box locks. Not least because of the lack of insulation, it is cold in these cabs, especially in winter – but at least one is protected against direct wind. The instruments with black dials correspond to the instruments of the earlier Wehrmacht bucket trucks. The driver’s cab is followed by the flatbed. The police flatbeds were equipped with a tarpaulin, a bow and two opposite benches on the loading area. After the start-up phase, presentable numbers were produced: By the end of 1946, 183 of the small utility vehicles and 31 ambulances had been built in various versions.

A total of 658 flatbed trucks were built between 1946 and 1949. Only very few flatbed trucks have survived since then.