As with other wartime expedients, the White Scout Car was slightly revised during its manufacture process as the war dragged on. A spare fuel canister was added in place of the right-hand side spotlight and the identifying crossed-swords decal removed from the side doors in later models. The flip-down armored visor for the forward windscreen changed some as well while the windscreen itself was revised over the original pilot vehicle version.
In practice, the M3 Scout Car proved a serviceable military scout car. However, limitations were obvious as the vehicle lacked much in the way of protection for its crew. The M3 was not a direct-contact vehicle and avoiding combat with anything more than enemy infantry increased crew survivability. Since all that protected the occupants overhead was canvas, the crew were at the mercy of in-direct fire weapons such as mortar and artillery and grenade attacks could also quickly kill all inside. The base armor protection was only viable against small arms fire, offering basic security in an ambush. The cross-country performance of the vehicle also proved lacking when compared to competing 6x6 wheeled forms with good power and traction and was further outclassed by tracked vehicles navigating the uneven and soft terrains of Battlefield Europe.
Regardless, it availability in numbers and its reach through Lend-Lease pushed the limits of the M3 series ten-fold. With over 20,000 produced, the vehicles were taken on by military forces beyond the United States even into the post-war years: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Norway, Philippines, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and others (see full users list below) were just some of the notable operators of the series. The Soviet Union received the type via Lend-Lease and the new Israeli Army also took on stocks of the type in the post-war years - using them in their 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The German Army was all too happy to reconstitute captured weapons/vehicles and operated an unknown number of captured M3 Scout Cars as their own. French cars were in service during the First Indochina War (1946-1954) and South Vietnam forces continued their use in the theater thereafter.
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