Why The VW Bus Was Born | The Bad Blonde Car History

Why The VW Bus Was Born | The Bad Blonde Car History Naturally our story of the Volkswagen Bus starts back in time in Post WWII Germany… Volkswagen had been busy making the VW bug.. If you remember the VW bug almost wasn’t a thing. The allied forces had tried to auction off the design jigs/dyes etc but no one wanted it, so they gave it back to Germany. So VW is enjoying VW bug success and their first dealer outside of Germany, was a gentlemen named Ben Pon. In 1946 Pon went to check out the VW factory located in Wolfsburg.. Fun fact, it was renamed in 1938 Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben, in English "City of the Strength Through Joy car”… In 1945, after the end of WWII the city name returned to Wolfsburg. While he was there Pon saw a plattenwagen. What is a platenwagen? It was a flatbed parts hauler based on the Beetle chassis. What he saw was opportunity. And with that he drew a very rudimentary design for a very simple van. I mean rudimentary… Something to keep in mind, at the time there was not many large passenger vehicles.. Pon presented the idea to Volkswagen and they were game! However, it was not quite the right timing. The Beetle was in high demand and they were too busy producing that to begin another project. However, two years down the road they would create the first VW van prototype. Let’s talk about some of the type VW bus’ most well known features, the the split window and the v-shaped roofline. How did these come about? Why were theses planned for and added? Aerodynamics. Aerodynamics helped but by nature of the beast, the van was slow… originally powered by an air cooled 1.1 liter flat four capable of 25 horsepower giving it a top speed of 55 mph. The first production VW bus rumbled off the assembly line in 1949.. And it was called the Kombi Kombi is derived by the german word Kombinationskraftwagen… Now naturally it occurred to check the Land Down Under lyrics to see if it was Kombi or Convi… “Traveling in a fried-out Kombi, On a hippie trail, head full of zombie” Now what does Kombi or Kombinationskraftwagen mean? Combination vehicle.. It can be a passenger vehicle, it can be a cargo vehicle. Like we already mentioned, there had not really been any successful large passenger vehicles.. So VW was trying to figure out the best to market this combination transport vehicle.. And what did they go with? They called it a most cost effective station wagon. The Volkswagen station wagon.. Soon they would release the panel van, and a year after the first Kombi rolled off the line they would release the Microbus, and soon a 23 window deluxe micro bus in 1951. And soon in 1952, a flatbed with either single or crew cab. Soon VW reached out to Westfalia to partner with making camper conversion kits.. and this partnership lasted from the 50s to 2003.. This was the birth of the Westies.. And all the van-lifers have this partnership to thank for making it a thing. Westfalia never skipped a generation of VW bus. In 1967, after 18 year production run, the original T1 bus was retired and handed the baton on the to second generation, the T2 or aka Microbus aka bay window.. There would be six generations of the VW bus in total, but the sates kind of got the enjoyment of the VW bus taken away from us in 1971. Ever heard of the chicken tax? Doesn’t include chickens anywhere in the tax! It was a tax on brandy, potato starch, dextrin, and get this small European trucks. What does all this mean? Well, apparently the US had chickens exporting to Europe so cheap that Europe put a major tax on them to which LBJ turned around and slapped a revenge tax back at them. The chicken tax is STILL around. So with the law, small trucks (or buses) price tags jumped by 25% immediately. With that, VW lost nearly a third of it’s sales equaling 6 million dollars in sales… BUT get this, and it’s is no surprise, it is said that LBJ made a deal with the head of the auto union workers to insure his reelection by promising to put a tariff on VW imports. The tariff didn’t kill it, but it certainly made it harder to get for it’s main market segment. In 1973, we would see the introduction of the T3. A small leap from it’s original design aesthetic, a bit more angular. This was also the first generation VW bus to see power steering and air conditioning. Ten years later, in 1983, they moved on from air cooled engines to wasserboxers. 1990 debuted the T4, the first front engine boss after forty years of rear engine configuration. It was definitely more conventional and very mini-vanny. 2013 the Vw Brazilian factory ceased production of the Kombi..