There’s so much delightfully misguided about this image from a 1991 South African Volkswagen bus brochure that I feel like we should talk about it, at least a bit. Oh, and as an aside, you can always tell a car picture is from South Africa (well, up until the 90s or so) because South Africa is the only country that required tiny white reflectors on the fronts of their cars. In this VW image you can see them, mounted on the underside of the bumper. Cool, right? Sure it is.
Anyway, back to this dork. I like the two-tone Bus there – we called this body style, the T3 Type 2, the Vanagon here in America, but in South Africa these went by various names, including Microbus and Kombi, and fancy ones were called Caravelles. The guy though, with the sort-of matching outfit (including red shoes!) and that guitar and that expression, all while parked right in the middle of the damn road and leaning on the bus like that – I can’t quite put my finger on one particular detail that does it here, but this whole setup is somehow wildly unappealing.
Like, the idea that you might be stuck in a VW bus with this guy for some long trip on an empty highway in the middle of a surprisingly well-manicured green nowhere is just an awful lot to deal with.
But none of this is the fault of the Microbus. I think South Africa really liked these T3 buses, since they seemed to have more versions of these than almost anyone. They were also the only place to officially badge the Type 2 as a “Microbus,” which was more of a marketing/informal name and I don’t think appeared on an actual badge in any other market.
It’s also worth remembering just what marvels of packaging these things were; they weren’t particularly large on the outside, but you could cram 15 people in these things! Sure, sitting four across on those benches isn’t really roomy, but it’s absolutely do-able.
There’s also the embracing of engine options for the Type 2; while we got the Wasserboxer motor here in the US, I think it was far more popular in South Africa. These aren’t exactly well or fondly remembered, but they were interesting engines. They’re one of the few examples of an air-cooled design adapted to water-cooling, which is at the root of the issues they had.
The cylinder heads were water-cooled, and the old finned cylinder jugs were replaced with water-jacketed cylinders. There were also miles of plumbing to move that coolant from the rear engine to the front-mounted radiator, and there were many points of potential leaks and whatnot.
Still, the 2.1-liter version of this engine made 82kW/110 hp, which was a significant power bump for pretty much any Type 2. It’s close to double what the original air-cooled T3s made!
VW South Africa even stuck the 2.6-liter Audi 5-cylinder engine into these, making 135 or so hp and, I believe, being the most cylinders ever stuck into the rear of a VW, at least officially from the factory. The Porsche 914/6’s engine was in the middle, and those were only Porsche-branded, with the VW-Porsche badge just for the four-bangers. VW did get tuning house Oettinger to make a six-cylinder Wasserboxer, but VW themselves never sold those.
But Oettinger stuck some into T3s and sold a few! There’s a video of one right above there. Those seem like fun sleepers!
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