By the mid-1960s, the Austrian army started looking for replacements of the aging Dodge WC series which it had received in 1956 from the departing American occupation forces. High off-road capabilities were required, and the two main Austrian truck manufacturers ÖAF/Gräf&Stift and Steyr-Daimler-Puch developed two very different proposals. While ÖAF/Gräf&Stift “downsized” its heavy truck line and presented the “Husar”, Steyr-Daimler-Puch based its development on the proven and extremely offroad-capable “Haflinger”. The result was the legendary “Pinzgauer”, which won this competition and would end up as one of the backbones of Austrian military transportation for the next five decades. Both of these prototypes were presented by 1966, the ÖAF 2-90 “Husar” had a payload of 3 tons on-road and 2 tons off-road, which was slightly higher than that of the “Pinzgauer”, however the extreme off-road capabilities of the “Pinzgauer’s” central tube frame design left no question which system would be adopted by the army. As ÖAF had performed a complete development for this competition, it was decided to also acquire 136 “Husars” to compensate them for their development effort. These “Husars” saw service with the communication battalions.
The “Husar” was no smashing success on the civilian market, as the weight/payload ratio of the vehicle was pretty unfavorable. The small number of produced “Husars” makes this vehicle a real classic of Austrian military vehicle history. For several years now the Austrian Husar Club regularly participates at “Auf Rädern und Ketten” (“On Wheels and Tracks”), the large military vehicle gathering of the Austrian Museum of Military History in Vienna, and every years it is again impressive how these “survivors” present themselves to the crowd.
