The Army used Scouts for administrative vehicles at the Yuma AZ Ordnance Test Station where I spent a couple of years. When it came time to take a vehicle up to Flagstaff for some "high altitude" testing, everyone who'd ever been there warned that the Scouts "wouldn't run fer SH*T" up there.

They had been trying to persuade the maintenance boys to "re-jet" the carburetors for the high altitude, but it took about 3.4 minutes when we got to the test area for me to find out what the real problem was.

The float bowl on the carburetor was on the front side, and whenever the nose started UP a grade of about 20% or more the fuel spilled out of the float bowl into the carb throat. Of course the engine flooded and died. Average grade on the mountain (off the roads) was 36 - 38%.

So I turned around and drove backwards every time I had to go uphill for the next three weeks. Ran like a scorched cat, as long as you kept its nose down.

I got a stiff neck and some serious bruises in the armpit from leaning out the window to miss (most of) what was behind me.

The "solution" was obvious for anyone who was less than a couple of generations downstream from the Model T, since one of its most notorious habits was inability to drive uphill. The reason was different - gravity feed from a fuel tank behind the engine and only a little above the carb, so the fuel flow stopped when the nose went up. Solution was the same: turn around and back up the hill.

Note that I have no idea whether the "GI" Scouts were all that similar to commercial models. The ones at Yuma were pretty much skeletal. (Needless to say they weren't air conditioned, but we never saw anything above about 116 F actual while I was there - except down in some of the gullies.)

John