My friends frequently tease me about my automotive taste. It’s not my passion for stupidly expensive high-performance sports cars, or my weakness for brash, flash, trash. It’s my ongoing affection for supremely ugly yet practical vehicles that triggers their head-shaking scorn. Dude, you like a minivan? Luckily, I have a ready defense that usually shuts them up. I tell them that when I was a kid, our family car was a Microbus.
Few vehicles are as identified with a particular time and place as the VW type 2 (the Bus’ official name). The Microbus practically screams ‘60’s San Francisco flower power. Ours was from a later era, acquired sometime around 1973 in the heart of the Midwest. My dad bought VW’s people mover after our Chevrolet Vega overheated for the second time in a year. Style was not as high on his list of priorities. He was looking for a sensibly-priced car that could transport a family of four.
It was a run-of-the-mill Bus. (I drooled over the camper-vans in the owner’s manual). Its fabricators blessed the Bus with a dubious creamsicle two-tone white-over-orange that didn’t improve when my brother blew chow down the passenger side outside St. Louis. The interior was finished entirely in the hardwearing black vinyl that's come to define ‘70’s cabins. Although the material resisted all sorts of stains, the seats either scorched your butt– passengers wearing shorts left the Bus looking like they’d been attacked by a waffle iron– or sucked away all body heat.
Yank back the sliding door (a big thing pre-minivan) and you discovered three full rows of seats bolted to the floor. They were only slightly more comfortable than the church pews they resembled, but you could fit six adults in the back (we were drafted for every carpool going). There was even a large square luggage area behind the back seats, roughly level with the rear passengers' heads. (Cargo net? What's a cargo net?) The raised luggage area hid the bus’ Achilles heel: a 1.7-liter, four cylinder engine. In fact, the Microbus was little more than a Beetle with a big box on top. This led to a few “issues”.
Those of you familiar with the Beetle's climate control system know its effectiveness depended entirely on its passengers’ psychological suggestibility. Now imagine the SAME system attempting to warm a Microbus with roughly five times the interior volume. Now imagine that same Bus encased in snow about to face a dark, Midwestern winter’s morning. My mother still speaks venomously of battling frost-bite at the helm. Summer was little better. Mediocre ventilation (only the front windows rolled down) and all that black vinyl made the Bus an oven on wheels.
The VW Microbus earned the "bus" part of its name from its driving position as much as its utility. The machine's steering wheel fed straight into the floor and spread across the driver’s lap in open-spoked glory. Bereft of power steering, driving the beast required a distinctly commercial mindset– and not a small amount of brute strength. I can still see my mother, all five foot nothing of her, wrestling the beast round corners.
Another “bus” feature: the driver and front passenger sat on top of the front wheel-wells. The Car Talk guys have bemoaned the negative safety implications of this seat positioning for years, and they have a point. For the record, we survived our only fender-bender without injury to our knees (the ductwork in front of us took the hit, which didn’t help the nominal heater any).
The Bus’ sloth tended to relegate safety concerns to the back of one’s mind. There was no way to measure the vehicle’s zero to 60 time. Barring a tailwind, there was no way the bus could crack a mile a minute, Richard Nixon’s 55mph speed limit was as unbreakable as the speed of light. When we moved back from California, my eight-year-old brain finally realized the truth. We went over the Sierras and the Rockies hugging the shoulder as cars, trucks, semis, even CAMPERS flew by. Even at such a tender age, I sensed that something was not quite right with a vehicle that couldn't keep up with continental drift.
In [partial] compensation, the Bus got decent mileage: mid to low 20's. It was also one of the most dependable vehicles on the road. (Oh how the Volkswagens have fallen!) Aside from a dead spot on the starter (which led to some entertaining push-starts), Ye Olde Type 2 ran with minimal hassles to 100K before getting seriously cranky.
Our return to the Midwest spelt the end for the bus. My mother finally took matters into her own hands and traded in the Bus on something smaller. I have fond memories of the Bus. I see it as a child, amazed at all the things it could do; rather than as an adult, remembering all it couldn’t. Who says nostalgia isn’t what it used to be?
being just a big older (apparently) my childhood memories are first of a 1958 cadillac sedan, complete with air suspension. it couldn’t hold as many people as a microbus but it had no trouble making the hills…
and then we got a 1963 rambler station wagon, complete with push-button automatic transmission. i thought that was so cool. the buttons even lit up.
Transporters are an odd affection harbored by many. I myself am guilty of finding highly modded transporters turning laps at hockenheim rather amusing. When equipped with Porsche or Audi sourced engine a transporter is perhaps the strangest object to orbit along the race line of a road course and perhaps not the slowest.
My memories are of a 1956 VW bus owned by a high school and college friend. Chasing seagulls on the local government wharf with it was one of his favorite ways of scaring his other young friends! The trick was to get real close before flooring it in low gear, as seagulls are about as arrogant as crows for not moving when something large is bearing down on them. Then the idea was to stop with the front of the bus hanging over the edge of the wharf with the young front passenger almost frightened to death. On wet days, the bus didn’t stop so well on that giant wooden wharf, but at least there was the security of the 10×10 wooden berm running around the periphery of the entire wharf.
Trick number 2 was to see how many people he could cram into the bus and still start off on about a 30% incline hill in town.. In those far off days, the hill was unpaved, and a death trap in winter, when it became a sheet of ice. Ironically, with about 8 guys aboard, it would actually start on the hill, due to minute wheelspin, but had no hope in warmer weather.
Yes sir, 36 hp wasn’t much, but the darn thing refused to break, despite the abuse, and one occasion when he forgot to refill the oil after a change and drove about a mile before remembering his error! In later years at college, I remember once making the 90 mile trip back to our hometown in a blizzard, all 8 and a half hours of it, with the heater absolutely useless, and constant ice-scraping of the windshield from the inside. It was good to be young and on an adventure! We had to breathe sideways to keep our breath from freezing on the windshield.
March on a decade, and I was a backpacking hitchhiker in Europe. Got a ride from a couple of California pyschopathic kids in a brand new 1972 bus that Daddy bought for them, picked up in Hanover and having its first service in Eindhoven, Holland. The only way they drove was flat out, foot to the floor. The engine as I recall was now 1.8 or two litres, and that thing would do about 88 mph on the autobahn and over 90 downhill with the engine absolutely thrashing. Mercedes drivers just could not believe how fast we were going; they would only gradually catch up and then stare at the wild long-haired hippies in the bus, as they slowly went by.
Ah, memories… Complete hoonery.
Sweet.
My goodness, this vehicle’s stock “performance” certainly puts recently reviewed products on this site in perspective, dosn’t it? And yet, they did what they were designed to do, very simply & reliably.
If anyone has failed to click on the link posted above to highly-modded VW Buses showing their a$$-hauling capabilities, I strongly recommend doing so. It’s a laugh out loud clip.
Well, sure beats my memories of the cars my folks owned when I was a kid during the 80s:
Chevy Caprice station wagon
Pontiac Sunbird(?) [bought it used, only had it a few months but memories of being stranded on the side of a road for hours because of a transmission failure last a lifetime]
Aries Station Wagon
Oldsmobile Delta 88
You’ll want to watch this one. An Aston Martin biting the dust, and a Porsche trying to catch …
The squareheads missed again. Not only did they invent the minivan and then abandon it, so that Lee Iacocca could retire on 30 million, they also had the first small pick up truck, based on the Rabbit. That also went into the dumpster just as the idea of small pick up trucks was beginning to ripen. Probably the same thinking(?) produced the Phaeton.
Great memories… the whole thing of scraping the inside of the windshield in winter and wishing for heat are not lost on me – my first car was a ’64 Corvair, so I can sympathize.
When I was growing up, a friend of mine’s family (whose parents emigrated from Germany) had both a Bug and a Bus. Those black seats in the Bus were lethal in the summer for sure!
Later when I was in college, we used to retrofit the old VW gasoline heaters into newer Bugs to have heat (living 20 miles from Canada makes one wish for heat in one’s car in winter). I always wondered if you could have done that with a Bus, but running the gas line to the already ill-protected front of the car would seem like a bad thing.
Ah, Beetles. In my ’62 Bug driving while wearing a sleeping bag through the south on the coldest Thanksgiving weekend on record thanks to the non-existent heaters. A HS friend dropping a Buick V-6 in the back of a Bug. With the 9″ rear tires you could feel the frame twist on windup. My old best friend assuring me his Bug was the most reliable car in existence, then why were working on the damn thing in his garage once a month? The Bug was “reliable” because it was easy to fix, not because it was any good. Why do you thing the Japanese lapped ’em?
An early VW bus memory: 1958: Nine adults and five children crammed into a mid ’50’s 30hp Samba (roof-windows, giant cloth sunroof) taking a one day tourist excursion from a village in Tyrol into Switzerland. Endless mountain passes, taken in first gear, not much faster than walking speed. But the scenery was unforgettable. It’s a good thing Europeans were seemingly all skinny back then, as this kind of sardine-in-a-can packing was par for the course throughout my childhood then.
I learned to drive in one of those things. it was a van as opposed to a bus and was owned by the Electricity Company in Ireland (ESB). I was an apprentice electrician at the tender age of 16 and having learned the basic driving skills in the VW, it prepared me for almost anything. With the van loaded with equipment and parts for line work, it’s 0 to 60 time was somewhere in the region of 2 weeks, 4 days, 6 hours, 3 minutes give or take a week! I drove it for a month with no clutch and rarely crashed the gears, it could take no end of abuse and surprisingly got me in and out of many muddy fields. I look back on it with affection although at the time I hated trying to warm up in it after a couple of hours at the top of a pole in the miserable Irish winter! Ah, the good old days!
Great Post…Such Memories…Im almost crying here…..
Those of you familiar with the Beetle’s climate control system know its effectiveness depended entirely on its passengers’ psychological suggestibility.
My first car was a 1966 VW Beetle with the 6-volt/push-start feature. I ran a propane blow-torch for heat in the winter that would “duke-it-out” with the air from the holes in the floorboards. The floorboard air would always “win” but just looking at the blow-torch flames would bring warmth to my heart…But nothing else.
What a GREAT… Um… “car” !
Wheres my tissues.
Maybe after a few more Eggnogs I will work up the “courage” to press a “Buy it Now” botton…. Geee… Thanks Andrew/Guys….
http://motors.listings.ebay.com/_Cars-Trucks_Volkswagen-Bus-Vanagon_W0QQa39Z1984QQa41Z2001QQalistZa39Q2ca41QQcurcatZtrueQQfromZR42QQgcsZ13QQpfidZ2473QQsacatZ6001QQsatitleZQQsocmdZListingItemListQQsofocusZpf
Back in the 80’s, I used to drive a 1982 Transporter (bus) as a delivery van in Israel, the thing I liked the most is the placement of the front wheels behind the driver, you could really make tight turns with it, specially in the not so wide Tel-Aviv streets.
The thing I hated the most, no A/C, and the back, just above the engine, was like an oven!
Ahhh the memories of Vdubbing. Back when dinosaurs roamed southern Ontario I ached to own a VW bug. Brand new out of the box at $1795 Cdn as i recall was far too much for this about to be groom. In the January 1962 my bride and I rented one for our honeymoon and if memory serves correctly it was 75 bucks for the week.
As we lived in Niagara Falls where else could we go on a limited budget? Of all places– Detroit! Oh what wonders we saw– abandoned cars on freeways, a store that sold donuts and coffee only and huge skyscrapers, some 20 stories tall!
On our return trip home in the storm of the winter, naturally, we often had to pull over and throw snow at the windscreen as alas, no windshiled washer. It did have a heater and it did not not work well either but we had our love to keep us warm.
It was at least five years before we had a car and that was a hand-med-own 51 Dodge that ended up as a backyard planter for our three toddlers.
Thanks for the memories— it will be 45 years of wedded blitz come January 20.
Rearguards
I will NEVER forget how cold I was in my friend's VW Microbus, as he drove from Medford (MA) to Laconia (NH). I was wrapped-up in every microfiber known to man, and yet the cold found a way to assault my bones. The bleak mid-winter landscape inching past the frosted windows made the endless journey that much more of an ordeal. On the positive side, I had some wild sex in the back of that machine.
Oh the memories!
For my childhood, it was a 1970 VW (type 3) Squareback… basically a 2 door wagon.
My mom tells me that she would lay down the rear seat and make the back a rolling play-pen for my brother and I… who needs seat belts or car seats??
I also recall a time when the throttle cable broke and we had a piece of rope running over the back seat that my mother would pull to accelerate for a week or two before it could be repaired.
We lived in south Georgia and I still remember the heat being weak… cannot imagine owning one of these north of the mason-dixon.
But still, we had that car for 10 years and over 100K… a feat for the time. I wonder if my kids will look back as fondly on the wife’s explorer??
Merry Christmas, all!
Sex in my microbus was my first thought when i saw this article, probably typical of everybody that owned one. Funny thing, it wasn’t all that wild or even sufficiently plentiful, but damn, it remembers nice 30 years later…
Thanks for the reminder, and a Merry Christmas to everybody.
So Farago, what you are saying is that you have fond-led Mammaries of the VW Microbus…AhrAhr.
Wheres my Eggnog….
oh, I win this thread!
My family has owned *Three* Type 2s,
one Breadloaf, a 71 model, that got *smooshed* by a big tree.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ppc/253634236/
A 1984 Vanagon GL that died too many times, and I said
“life is too short to spend so much of it fixing your car”
and scrapped it
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ppc/sets/72157594157040210/
And the one my father still has, but I don’t have any photos of it, a 1987 Wolfsburg Weekender Vanagon.
We also owned a Super Beetle and a Type 3 Squareback station wagon “thingy”.
Read my profanity laced description of the VWs my family has owned here:
http://www.network54.com/Forum/405166/message/1164541826/ (don’t click if offended by naughty words)
I… don’t like VWs anymore.
The bus is forever part of our childhood. Mom, Dad, and seven kids. No other vehicle could meet our need for room, let alone low cost.
It was a necessity, especially with the three hour trip on Thanksgiving to visit my grandmother as we went from Cornish, NH to Lyndonville, VT. (Did I mention the interstate went only half-way in those days?)
And cold? Volkswagen people knew cold…
I learned to drive on a maroon and white version (the mile long shift operated in a slanted “H” pattern; pound directly down and to the left to get into reverse-and I do mean pound) and though I lamented over the lack of anything resembling speed or power, it got me where I needed to go.
Believe me, at sixteen, being able to get out of the house in that bus without little brothers or sisters in tow? Yeah, I loved that bus.
The EuroVan we owned was apparently channeling the spirit of the Type 2. Dead slow, mediocre heat, mediocre cooling, uncomfortable seating (except if you were driving), noisy.
I still loved it. We had great vacations in it.
You can buy a Type 2 brand new from Volkswagen do Brasil:
http://www.vwbr.com.br/Automoveis/?idModelo=35799
The Type 2 has since been converted to a Wasserboxer engine and uses parts binnage from more contemporary VW models (gauge clusters and the like), but other than that it’s still the same old Transporter.
In Brazil they also sell a pickup based on the newer Rabbit/Golf platform:
http://www.vwbr.com.br/Automoveis/?idModelo=35591
Volkswagen South Africa still sells the original Rabbit pickup:
http://www.vw.co.za/models/pickup/
naturally, we often had to pull over and throw snow at the windscreen as alas, no windshiled washer.
Another great feature was that you would always have to consider what you valued most. A clean windshield or a useful spare tire….Sniff…Sniff…Sniff…..
I was in Berlin in the early 90s and met a new-new Soviet Man in a bar. He said “You know what you Americans problem is.” Of course you can never “escape” the question… “NO…What” I said. He said “You never had to take a cold shower” To which I replied “True. But we had to drive a VW Beetle in the winter.”… He laughed and bought me a beer.
Click and Clack mentioned that the front passengers knees were the first line of defense in a head on collision in a Microbus.
^ speaking of “clack” that reminds me of something else, one of the VW bus sounds, I like the way the brake pedal goes clunk when you release it too suddenly. Both the breadloaf busses and vanagons do this.
Just an observation (yeah, I know, I’m odd)
The microbus phenomenon is rampant at collector car auctions and shows that the value of a collectible vehicles is based solely on memories – one's own and those you pick up from others, via mass media. A couple of years back, a lady paid about $90,000 for a 1966 VW bus, at one of the six auctions in the Monterey CA during the Historic Weekend. The crowd was reportedly stunned. But similar prices have been achieved, with some regularity, by the famed 23 window microbuses, which were the staple of the "flower children" of the late 1960s; add a Grateful Dead dancing bear for period authenticity. Were they good vehicles to drive around in, most especially on American roads where lurked high-powered cars driven by edgy folks waiting to drive you off the road? Well, of course not. But none of that matters. Those who don't understand why people pay what they do, for these old barges, may fit Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Full disclosure: I have owned a '65 and '66 VW Beetle. The last Beetle had been hit, before I bought it and had an air leak, up front. I sure got tired of driving that around in winter and using an ice scrapper for the inside of the windshield. But hey, it was an experience and that's all life really is, a learning experience.
I had a ’70 Beetle for about two weeks. It threw a rod.
I never owned a bus, but I did have the distinct pleasure of driving a squareback for a month one very cold winter, by local standards. That was not fun, but the car was very reliable.
A friend had a 23 window bus and he said it was the single biggest crumpet catcher he ever drove, and he had some nice cars. Girls would get in and almost immediately be figuring out a way to get naked in the back.
This was southern California, mind, so they probably never had to worry about frostbite.
I was born in 1961 and have never understood the appeal of the air cooled VWs. They were buy and large horrible vehicles. The heat wasn’t worth a darn. Acceleration and handling were nothing to be happy about. Brakes were so-so. Tires came right from the Model A era of automotive engineering. Long term durability wasn’t very good either. Luckily it was easy to drop a VW engine out, because by 100k miles you surely were going to need to do just that.
No oil filter … what a brilliant idea, not!
Some of my first automotive maintenance work was on our 1972 Squareback (type 3). Memories of changing the spark plugs on that thing still haunt me! Changing the master cylinder wasn’t much fun either as it had to be done from under the car.
About all it had going for it was that it was cute!
The heater system in those buses and the old beetles was designed with Citröen designers’ élan. When the Citro designers get together to create a new model, they begin with:
“The door ‘andle. Last year it was too facile to find it. Where do we hide it this year?”
And the VW designers created looped tubing that supposedly channeled hot air somewhere, just not in any direction where someone would be seated. You could move and contort into uncomfortable positions where some heat would reach you – or you could melt the rubber off your boots when you discovered a really hot spot. You just didn’t get the air to a temperature where it would keep beer from going solid.
You guys; I hate this vehicle, yet you sucked me in with your reminiscences and your YouTubes and ebay auctions!
I’ll never get the last 30 minutes of my life back!
Okay, I’m not really angry; and I did smile a couple of times. But enough is enough! I think I’ll go watch paint dry now…
:)
Great link to the racing refrigerator boxes.
>>>Bereft of power steering, driving the beast required a distinctly commercial mindset– and not a small amount of brute strength. I can still see my mother, all five foot nothing of her, wrestling the beast round corners.
I can’t help thinking your memory is playing tricks on you. Rear engine cars have remarkably light steering, and my experience driving them includes both old Beetles and a microbus. Also, in the experience of people I knew in childhood who had microbuses, the engine had a lot of trouble, precisely because the bus was so underpowered. One friend of mine with a Vanagon had two or three engines blow on her before she finally stuck a Subaru engine in it, apparently a common remedy. (She like the car because she can drive half way across the country to sheepdog trials and sleep inside the thing .)
I would finally dispute the notion that the styling is ugly. it’s not pretty like American cars of yore, but I think it’s loaded with style. I love going to Microbus day at Boston’s Larz Anderson automotive museum, and seeing one always makes me smile. As did reading the article, despite my criticisms.
I happened to be in San Francisco when Jerry Garcia had just died. My cousin who lives there and I made a detour into Golden Gate Park where probably thousands of deadheads had assembled. There were loads of wonderfully decorated microbuses. The weirdest had the top of a beetle grafted backwards to the top of the microbus, and belonged to one “Ellis D”. (go to motorlegends.com, click on “art cars,” and click through until you get to it.
RF: I will NEVER forget how cold I was in my friend’s VW Microbus, as he drove from Medford (MA) to Laconia (NH).
I was wrapped-up in every microfiber known to man, and yet the cold found a way to assault my bones. The bleak mid-winter landscape inching past the frosted windows made the endless journey that much more of an ordeal.
On the positive side, I had some wild sex in the back of that machine.
In my accounting system, that definitely makes up for the cold ride from Medford to New Hamster
I have to say that I have some not very fond memories of these rolling road-blocks. They should have been sold new with “slow moving vehicle” reflective triangles.
I think these VWs are the reason why I never could get my head around a minivan for personal use. Never had one, had station wagons sedans for my (once) young family instead.
I also have a ’99 Chevy Astrovan Delivery that I bought from a florist that was going out of business.
It is the perfect combonation of a car and a light truck; you can lock stuff up inside, has plenty of pep, and handles….acceptably. It has 182000 miles on it (half of them mine) and is still going strong!
heh heh, thanks for the Memories. Dad got his first bug in ’57 when the train stopped running to Greenbush. About ’64, he replaced the 54 Chevy Suburban with a ’62 VW bus. I took my Driving test in a 65 microbus. I drove a bug until the late 80s. I liked the aircooled VWs. When they broke, they were easy to fix. Heat is for wimps, I rigged a small electric heater and a fan into the drivers side defrost duct. It kept my fingers from getting frost bite when I had to use them to defrost the windshield. I taught my wife to drive in a 62 Bug that kept eating fanbelts. A fact she still throws in my face 34 yrs later. ‘Rene was one of the last people to make it off rt 128 during the blizzard of 78. She was driving a 66 bug.