Here’s a simple recipe for making a legend. Take one part reliable, aircooled boxer engine, one part tough four-speed gearbox, one long durable chassis, a multi-leaf torsion bar and a swing axle. Arrange it all in a large breadbox using your common sense. Then give it a dual tone paint job, garnish liberally with chrome, affix a large VW in the front and serve it to all your near and dear ones.
Yep, it’s actually that simple. And that’s more or less how it was built. The story behind the birth of the Volkswagen Microbus is as cute as it gets. Ben Pon, a Dutch businessman, wanted to be the first VW importer in the world (which he eventually managed, but that’s not important now). For that, Pon went to meet the British officials in charge of the Volkswagen plant two years after the Second World War. He saw a rudimentary load-carrying pick-up – essentially a motorised platform on wheels cobbled from Beetle parts – busy doing the rounds in the plant. Which gave him an idea. He made a basic sketch in his notebook of a box with rounded edges and four wheels, something that resembled what a child would draw if you ask him to draw a van. He put forth the idea to the British officers and suggested that it could use the Beetle’s running gear, with the boxer engine, not surprisingly, placed at the rear.
Some years later, the German head of VW, the legendary Heinrich Nordhoff, came to know about this idea for a commercial vehicle based on Beetle mechanicals, and ensured it got into production. That’s because Nordhoff perceived the need for a vehicle that could boast the Beetle’s reliability and durability with a higher payload. Internally called the Type 2 (the Beetle being Type 1), it was the first all-new Volkswagen design after WWII, and in production form, it turned out to be virtually identical to Pon’s illustration!
Launched in 1950, it was a marvel in packaging, offering plenty of cargo space, large side doors, a heavy duty suspension and with a host of body styles including panel van, single and double cabs, ambulances, camper, and of course, the Microbus. It turned out to be so popular that over 800,000 units of the Type 2 were produced between 1950 and 1967.
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