VW’s ‘Magic Bus’ origin a long, strange trip
It is perhaps fitting that the introduction to the definitive book on Volkswagen’s Transporter reads like a blissedout hippie’s stream of consciousness. The Transporter (also known as the Microbus, Camper, Kombi, Westfalia — its official Volkswagen Type 2 designation — and the slightly-too-precious sobriquet, Splitty) is, of course, the ultimate counterculture vehicle, having transported hippies to communes, protesters to peace marches, music lovers to Woodstock, drugs across borders (at least until customs officials got hip to that whole peace and love graffiti schtick) and, of course, penniless folk-rock bands to their gigs.
Indeed, Mike Harding’s book The VW Camper Van: A Biography starts with a long meander through an endless number of bands, all seemingly plying their trade in some remote backwater of England. We get a treatise on why the smell of fresh bread should have been marketed as an aftershave, how British nasal inhalers of the day were rumoured to be infused with Benzedrine and a loving description of a Camper Van named Molly.
Indeed, if the backdrop had been South Central L.A. instead of Lancashire, the whole thing could have been a particularly periphrastic, THC-fuelled Cheech and Chong narrative. Of course, I might have been in a better groove for this jive had I just fired up a fat one.
Eventually, Harding — a, what else could he be, folk music DJ and banjo player — gets to the interesting bits, namely how the Volkswagen Type 2 — sign of freedom and rebellion for countless generations — came into being. It’s a bit of a twisted plot, full of incongruities and happenstances that, were it not for the fact that it’s set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in war-torn Germany, you’d swear had the markings of a reefer-fuelled plot of intrigue and derring-do.
It turns out, at least according to Harding, that the only reason that we have the Transporter (or its predecessor, the Volkswagen Type 1, which we know as the Beetle) is because one somewhat- antsy British major, Ivan Hirst, ordered by his superiors to “just sit” on the KdF-Stadt factory (in the town of Fallersleben, later renamed Wolfsburg), revitalizes the bombed-out VW factory (with a carcass of a B-17 Flying Fortress occupying the ruins of a major potion of the plant), mainly because he’s too bored just to play security guard.
His hijinks read a little like a comic-con fantasy gone historic. On taking control of the factory, Hirst discovers a few wilting Beetles, left unattended since the beginning of hostilities, gathering dust in a corner of the rambling plant. Piecing together one good model from the remnants and painting it military green, he drives one of the few pre- War Beetles to his BAOR (British Army Of the Rhine) headquarters where the commander promptly orders 20,000. But, to produce them, he has to rescue some “liberated” tools and dies from marauding Russians and save the plant from a dynamite-demented pyromaniacal Brigadier named Blandford Newsome, a.k.a. Blasted Nuisance, whose idea of a good time is geligniting unsuspecting German factories.
With the tools, dies and presses back in action, Hirst has the first 10,000 Beetles produced before the end of 1946, most of them, according to the author, smelling like fish because of the glue the factory was forced to use to affix the headliner.
The next character in this Teutonic Commedia dell’arte is Bernardus “Ben” Pon, who had been Holland’s Volkswagen importer before the war (I’m guessing here that his business had not boomed) and who, according to Harding, had a habit of showing up at the Wolfsburg plant in a purloined Dutch army general’s garb claiming “that without this majestic entry nobody would have taken any notice of him.”
And nobody would have, had it not been for the serendipity that Hirst was looking to build some form of transporter vehicle and Pon saw a future in a small commercial delivery vehicle.
On one sheet of a small looseleaf notebook, the erstwhile Dutch designer sketched the “bread loaf ” with wheels that became the VW Panel Van. The notebook and sketch still exist and what is notable is that one of the most successful vehicles ever produced — more than 10 million variants over 63 years — owes its origin to one childlike pencil drawing by a somewhat eccentric auto dealer, who later went on to riches via exporting Beetles to the United States.
I have no idea how much of this folklore is true (the author, according to his bio, is also a comedian), but if it isn’t, Harding sure weaves some spellbinding fiction. Some of it is easily verifiable. Harding, of course, pays serious props to Heinrich Nordhoff, the ex-Opel director who actually took Hirst’s dream and Pon’s doodling and turned it into a production reality.
Someone really has to pick up the movie rights to this “documentary.” I’m seeing Good Morning Vietnam with swastikas. Or Inglourious Basterds with Volkswagens.
Or maybe I’ve been smoking too much wacky tobacky.
Volkswagen’s Type 2 — actually now in its fifth generation — has been produced all over the world, most notably in Mexico, where production stopped in 1995, and Brazil, where the Kombi is still produced at VW’s Sao Paulo plant. But that glorious 63year history will come to an end on Dec. 31, when new Brazilian regulations calling for airbags and anti-lock brakes — which Volkswagen says it cannot engineer into the current platform — come into effect.