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The VW Bus Took the Sixties
on the Road. Now it’s Getting
a twenty-First-Century
Makeover
Once, it sparked dreams of community and counterculture.
What’s gained—and lost—when flower power is electrifi ed?
In 1976, at the tail end of the Ford Administration, hippies no longer hip, Sue Vargo and
Molly Mead decided that they wanted to drive to the Florida Keys in a Volkswagen bus.
They were best friends, in their twenties, living in a women-only commune in
Massachusetts: muddy boots, acoustic guitars, mercurial vegetarians. They bought a
beat-up VW bus, circa 1967, red and white, with a split windshield, a stick shift that
sprouted up from the floor like a sturdy sapling, a big, flat, bus-driver steering wheel half
the size of a hula hoop, and windshield wipers that waved back and forth—cheerful and
eager, like a puppy—without wiping anything away. The bus had no suspension. “You
just bounced along,” Vargo said, bobbing her head. “Boing, boing, boing.”
This year, Volkswagen is bringing back the bus—souped up, tricked out, and no longer
bouncy—as the ID. Buzz. “ID.” stands for “intelligent design,” and “Buzz” means that it’s
electric. It might be the most anticipated vehicle in automotive history. Volkswagen has
been teasing a return of the classic, iconic, drive-it-to-the-Grateful-Dead bus for more
than two decades. (I’m one of the people who’ve been counting the days.) The
company keeps announcing that it’s coming, and then it never comes. Finally, it really is
coming, and not only is it electric but it can also be a little bit psychedelic, two-toned, in
the colors of a box of Popsicles: tangerine, lime, grape, lemon. It’s on sale in Europe
this fall and will be available in the United States in 2024. (One reason for the wait is
that Volkswagen is making a bigger one for the U.S. market, with three rows of seats
instead of two.) Volkswagen expects the Buzz, which has a range of something like two
hundred and sixty miles, to be the flagship of a fast-growing electric fleet. The C.E.O. of
Volkswagen of America said that the demand for the Buzz in the U.S. is unlike anything
he’s seen before. “The Buzz has the ability to rewrite the rules,”
Top
Gear
reported in
April, naming it Electric Car of the Year.
Bus nuts are busting out of their pop-tops. “I want one!” is more or less the vibe online.
But not all bus nuts are on board. Sue Vargo is dubious. The Buzz, in the way of new
E.V.s, is more swoosh than boing, less a machine you operate—pulling levers, cranking
wheels, pumping brakes—than a computer you ride around in while its screen flashes
offi cious little reminders at you. This is what new cars do, what they are. It’s not what old
cars did, or what they were. The bus was cheap; the Buzz is pricey. (The base U.S.
version is expected to cost around forty-fi ve thousand dollars.) Also, the front end of the
bus, famously, had a face, a loopy, goofy, smiling face: the eyes two perfectly round,
bug-eyed headlights, the nose a swooping piece of chrome trim, the mouth a gently
curving bumper. The Buzz has a face, too, but its eyes, hard and angular, look angry, as
if beneath a furrowed brow, and its smile is a smirk. “If this is the future,” someone on
the VW Bus Junkies Facebook page posted, “I’d rather live in the past.”
The future of the automobile is, undeniably, swoosh and buzz and smart—smart this,
smart that. But is it appealing? VW’s pitch for the Buzz marries nostalgia with moral
seriousness about climate change, a seriousness that, for VW, is a particular necessity.
Volkswagen dominated the diesel-vehicle industry with its “clean diesel” cars and trucks
until, in 2015,
it admitted to tampering with the software on more than ten million
vehicles
in order to cheat on emissions tests. The scandal
shattered the company
and
led to the resignation of Martin Winterkorn, then the VW Group’s C.E.O. He still faces
criminal charges in Germany; another VW executive was given a prison sentence by an
American court. Civil suits are ongoing. Just this May, Volkswagen agreed to pay nearly
two hundred and fi fty million dollars to settle claims fi led in England and Wales.
Sue Vargo and her wife used to own a diesel VW Golf. “After the scandal, we brought it
back to the dealer and traded it in for a new, gas Golf, for basically nothing,” she told
me, but she doesn’t trust VW. A lot of people feel that way. The scandal likely sped up
Volkswagen’s plans to go electric. Last year, the company launched its Way to Zero
initiative, gunning for Tesla and pledging net carbon emissions of zero by 2050 at the
latest. The pledge involves not only the cars that it makes but how it makes them: VW is
investing in wind farms all over Europe and one of the largest solar plants in Germany.
By 2030, half of Volkswagen’s U.S. sales are expected to come from E.V.s. No
carmaker is investing so much in the jump to electric. Even Elon Musk has conceded
that although Tesla leads the E.V.-tech race, Volkswagen places a very respectable
second.
The Volkswagen ID. Buzz, then, isn’t just any electric car. It’s a bid for Volkswagen’s
redemption. Is it also the car that can usher in an E.V. revolution, a true turn of the
wheel in the long history of the automobile?
In April, I went to see the Buzz at the New York International Auto Show, at the Javits
Center, a glass-and-steel K’nex box of a building that has exactly as much charm as an
airport. Walking there, down West Thirty-eighth Street, I passed a four-story brick stable,
with thirty-six horses housed on the second floor and a carriage parked out front, near a
sign that read “SHARE THE ROAD: Horses paved the way.” Actually, when road paving
began,
it was for bicycles
. The New York auto show didn’t start out as an auto show; it
started out, in the eighteen-nineties, as the New York bicycle show. Bicycles, at the
time, were known as “silent horses,” just as cars became known as “horseless
carriages.” Then cars drove bicycles off the road. Many of those cars were electric. In
1899, when the bicycle show became the bicycle and automobile show, nearly every
automobile it displayed was electric. The
Times
predicted that every vehicle in the city
would soon be “propelled by the wonderful motive power which was discovered as
controllable, years and years ago, by the ever illustrious Benjamin Franklin.” In 1900,
the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who turned up for the bicycle and auto show got a
chance to see more than twenty electric cars—manufactured by fi rms that included the
American Electric Vehicle Co., the General Electric Automobile Co., and the Indiana
Bicycle Co.—alongside two gasoline-powered runabouts, two steam-powered carriages,
one gas-run wagon, and one Auto-Quadricycle. The fi rst New York auto show, held later
that year, featured an indoor track, made of wooden planks, that you could race the cars
around, and General Electric’s coin-operated “electrant,” or electric hydrant, a four-foot-
tall charging station, where, for a quarter, you could get a twenty-fi ve-mile recharge. The
Times
reported, “It is expected that these automatic devices will be installed in suburban
villages and places on the main lines of travel between important points where an
electric vehicle might otherwise become stalled for lack of power.” (Today, there still
aren’t anywhere near enough charging stations around.)
By the turn of the century, one of every three motorcars in the U.S. was electric. As an
electric-car manufacturer remarked, gas engines “belch forth from their exhaust pipe a
continuous stream of partially unconsumed hydrocarbons in the form of a thin smoke
with a highly noxious odor.” He couldn’t fathom anyone tolerating them for long:
“Imagine thousands of such vehicles on the streets, each offering up its column of
smell.” Electric cars didn’t pose this problem; they were also quieter, easier to drive, and
simpler to repair. The problem was the storage capacity of the battery. A lot of people
put their faith in a collaboration between the Edison Storage Battery Company, founded
in 1901, and the Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903. “The fact is that Mr. Edison and
I have been working for some years on an electric automobile which would be cheap
and practicable,” Henry Ford told the
Times
in 1914. But by 1917 the collaboration had
fallen apart, and by 1920 the gas engine had won. The E.V. dark age had begun.
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That dark age may be ending. At the 2022 New York auto show, half the floor space was
devoted to E.V.s. Downstairs, on an E.V. test track powered by Con Edison, you could
ride around in more than twenty-fi ve different electric cars; upstairs, you could test-drive
Ford’s new electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning. It was as if the marriage between
Edison and Ford had, at last, been consummated. Still, there was plenty of shtick.
Subaru had the greenest display—fake pine trees, fake rocks, potted evergreens,
hanging vines, a real dog run, ferns, fake logs, “bear-resistant” trash containers, and a
new S.U.V. called the Outback Wilderness—but only one actual electric car, the
Solterra, parked in a fake forest. (The Wilderness runs on gasoline, twenty-two city
miles to the gallon.)
Volkswagen displayed its gleaming fleet in a back corner of the main show floor, where
the Buzz was parked on a platform behind a plastic half wall and roped off, like a work
of art. It was one of the few cars at the show that you couldn’t climb into or touch.
People were curious about it, took pictures, pointed it out to their kids. “I think it’s sharp,”
they’d say. “Is it a Bulli?” (That’s what the VW bus is called in Germany.) Or, “Oh, a
Kombi!” (what it’s called in much of Latin America). Technically, the Buzz is the start of a
whole new line, but sentimentally it’s the eighth generation of a very old car.
Volkswagen’s fi rst car, the Type 1, is better known as the VW Beetle. It dates to the
company’s origins in Nazi Germany. Hitler wanted a “people’s car,” and in 1934 the
Reich commissioned the designer Ferdinand Porsche to develop it. The Type 1 was
manufactured at a factory in Wolfsburg, whose workers, in the early nineteen-forties,
consisted mostly of
Dienstverpflichtete
, forced laborers, including Polish women; Soviet,
Italian, and French prisoners of war; and concentration-camp prisoners. (In the
nineteen-nineties, Volkswagen paid reparations.) After the war, the Volkswagen factory
in Wolfsburg was one of the few sites of industrial production not razed by bombing, and
the Allies set about supporting its operation as a way to bolster West Germany’s
economic redevelopment. The fi rst postwar Beetles were sold in 1945. Not long
afterward, a Dutch importer noticed that workers at Wolfsburg had used spare parts—
Type 1 chassis, piles of boards, steering wheels—to put together makeshift
Plattenwagen
, flatbed carts, to carry their tools. He had the idea that if you put a box on
top of the chassis, instead of just a platform, you’d have a pretty neat little bus. This
became the Type 2, the original VW bus, also known as the T1, the fi rst-generation
Transporter. It was fi rst sold in 1950, and six years later VW opened a factory in
Hanover that was entirely dedicated to building the new model. In the argot of kids’
flicks, the Type 1 is Herbie, from the 1968 Disney movie “The Love Bug”; the Type 2 is
Fillmore, from the 2006 Pixar fi lm “Cars.” (George Carlin did Fillmore’s voice.)
T he T1 and T2 sold like crazy. In Europe, the VW bus could do anything: it was used as
a fi re truck, an ambulance, a delivery vehicle, a taxi. It didn’t have a lot of power, but it
could go anywhere and park in any spot, and it could carry a lot more than you’d think.
People loved it for camping, especially if they got the Westfalia, a model that came with
two beds, a hammock, a refrigerator, a stove, a kitchen cabinet, and a dining table.
Motor Trend
wrote, “More a way of life than just another car, the VW Bus, when
completely equipped with the ingenious German-made Kamper kit, can open up new
vistas of freedom (or escape) from humdrum life.” In the U.S., the bus wasn’t at fi rst
called a bus—it was called a station wagon—and was marketed as the ideal car for the
suburban family. The hippie part came later. You get the sense that something was
changing, a mood shifting, in a TV ad from 1963. The camera pans around a VW
Samba, a model with twenty-one windows, while a man’s voice asks:
A year or so later, the VW bus had become the iconic image of the counterculture. You
could go to concerts in it, or to protests. You could smoke pot in it, or fool around. You
could sleep there, on the cheap. You could plot a revolution, or you could store your
surfboard. Still, for all the cult of the counterculture, the fate of the VW bus, starting in
the nineteen-sixties, mainly had to do with the price of chicken.
Here’s where I need to explain about the Chicken War. In the nineteen-fi fties, the factory
farming of poultry by Big Agribusiness exploded, leading to a plunge in the price of
chicken and a boom in the market for it. American farmers exported staggering numbers
of cheap, frozen chicken parts to Europe, so many that chicken became one of the most
valuable U.S. exports—much to the distress of German farmers. “In Bavaria and
Westphalia, protectionist German farmers’ associations stormed that U.S. chickens are
artifi cially fattened with arsenic and should be banned,”
Time
reported in 1962. “The
French government did ban U.S. chickens, using the excuse that they are fattened with
estrogen. With typical Gallic concern, Frenchmen hinted that such hormones could have
catastrophic effects on male virility.” Members of Europe’s Common Market raised tariffs
on imported chicken. “Everyone is preoccupied with Cuba, Berlin, Laos—and chickens,”
one German minister reported after a visit to the U.S. The German Chancellor,
describing two years of diplomatic talks with
President Kennedy
, said, “I guess that
about half of it has been about chickens.” Americans were furious: there was talk, for a
time, of pulling U.S. troops out of NATO unless the chicken tax was dropped. Instead, in
December, 1963,
President Johnson
, eying the next year’s election and needing the
support of the United Auto Workers, not least for his civil-rights agenda, retaliated in
kind. Volkswagen had started selling a Type 2 pickup truck that was becoming popular.
The U.A.W. was threatening a strike. Johnson, whose Secretary of Defense was
Robert
McNamara
, the former C.E.O. of Ford Motors, imposed a twenty-fi ve-per-cent tax on
imported light trucks. It was aimed at Volkswagen, but it applied to everyone. It has
never been lifted.
Because of the tax, Volkswagen couldn’t sell the Type 2 in the United States as any kind
of truck—not as a pickup, not as a panel van, not as any vehicle that could be construed
as commercial. It could only be a passenger van, a family car. Although Dodge is
usually given credit for inventing the minivan, if “credit” is the word, it’s really
Volkswagen that invented it, out of necessity. As the nineteen-sixties wore on, though,
driving around a pile of people came to mean something different, something about
community. There’s the faded-green rusted rear door of a 1966 Type 2 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: it was used by
civil-rights activists in South Carolina to take Black children to school. Painted on it, in
wobbly white letters, are the words “LOVE IS PROGRESS.”
Sue Vargo got her fi rst car, a used VW Beetle, in 1973, the year she graduated from
Michigan State. The bus and the Beetle have the same engine, toylike and in the back,
