Volkswagen, maker of the Beetle automobile, expanded its product offerings to include a microbus, which went into production on March 8th, 1950. Known officially as the Volkswagen Type 2 (the Beetle was the Type 1) or the “Transporter,” the bus became a favorite mode of transportation for hippies in the U.S. during the 1960s and became an icon of the American counterculture movement.
The concept for the Type 2 is credited to Dutch Volkswagen importer Ben Pon, importer of Beetles to the Netherlands, who saw a market for a small bus. He first sketched the van in a doodle dated April 23, 1947. Volkswagen engineers further developed the idea and in March 1950, the vehicle, with its boxy, utilitarian shape and rear engine, went into production. The bus eventually collected a number of nicknames, including the “Combi” (for combined-use vehicle) and the “Splittie” (for its split windshield); in Germany it was known as the “Bulli.” In the U.S., it was referred to by some as a “hippie van” or bus because it was used to transport groups of young people and their camping gear and other supplies. Some owners painted colorful murals on their buses.
The bus was only the second product offering for Volkswagen, a company whose history dated back to the 1930s Germany. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and announced he wanted to build new roads and affordable cars for the German people. At that time, Austrian-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) was already working on creating a small car for the masses. Hitler and Porsche later met and the engineer was charged with designing the inexpensive, mass-produced Volkswagen, or “people’s car.” In 1938, work began on the Volkswagen factory, located in present-day Wolfsburg, Germany. Although many Germans had placed their orders (and paid for) the new car, full-scale vehicle production didn’t begin until after World War II.
In the 1950s, the Type 1 Volkswagen arrived in the U.S., where the initial reception was lukewarm, due in part to the car’s historic Nazi connection as well as its small size and unusual rounded shape (which later led to it being dubbed the “Beetle”). In 1959, the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach launched a groundbreaking campaign that promoted the car’s diminutive size as a distinct advantage to consumers, and over the next several years VW became the top-selling auto import in the U.S. In 1972, the VW Beetle passed the iconic Ford Model T as the world’s best-selling car, with over 15 million vehicles produced.
The last factory in the world that produced the T2 was located in Brazil. Production in Brazil ceased on December 31, 2013, due to the introduction of more stringent safety regulations in that country. This marked the end of an era with the rear-engine Volkswagens manufactured (after the 2002 termination of its T3 successor in South Africa), which first originated in 1935 with their Type 1.
The new “Bulli Concept” which made its debut at the 2011 Geneva auto show gives a nostalgic wink to the classic Volkswagen microbus 60 years after its original debut, and is supposedly a sequel to that earlier show van. While the original T2’s were buses, this little tribute is a compact multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) with four hinged doors. The Bulli was engineered and designed as a low-cost alternative to more conventional VW vans available in Europe. The two-tone paint job is a styling statement seen on other Volkswagen models like the next Passat CC, the second-generation Phaeton, and the Up! concept vehicles.
Whereas the rear-engine bus started life as a pragmatic and minimalistic postwar hold-all, the new Bulli purports to be a lifestyle tool as well as a practical runabout. Measuring 157 inches in length, 69 inches in width, and 67 inches in height, the cream-over-claret show car, which sits on a 103-inch wheelbase, offers the interior space of a Golf with a footprint barely larger than that of a Polo. The cream-over-tomato-soup ’63 “Hippie Bus” was 11 inches longer, had three rows of seats, a bigger cargo deck, and more head and legroom.
Update:
Seventy years after the birth of the first Volkswagen Transporter, the VW micro bus has matured into a true classic car icon. Used vehicles still reach top prices on the market today.
The production version of the ID. Buzz debuted on 9 March 2022, with availability in the US in 2024
Source: Wikipedia, History.com/this-day-in-history.www.automobilemag.com; www.vw.ca
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