Background
Whether you’re going to California or Cornwall, there’s nothing cooler to go in than a Type 2 Camper. VW’s masterpiece is still a common sight on the M5 in the summer months, as hoards or happy campers head south in one of the most iconic utility vehicles of the 20th century.
In production for a world-beating 64 years, the Type 2’s days finally ended in 2013, when the last versions rolled out of VW’s Achieta plant near Sao Paolo, Brazil, as they had for the previous 34 years. Quite simply, this slow, characterful, economical and easy-to-maintain minibus, van or camper had been irreplaceable. It was still selling well when VW applied the brakes. But modern safety regs had finally caught up with this much-loved vehicle.
The Camper version has long been the height of VW’s offbeat motoring chic. Second-hand examples − especially the original split-windscreen models with their swooping V-shaped fronts − command eye-watering prices, while if you find a high-spec Samba-Bus with skylight windows and a cloth sunroof (they were designed for Alpine touring), the price will be as high as the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak.
Certainly, if you’re one of the countless thousands happy to get along with the T2’s slow and meandering ways, this oddball, yet highly functional machine remains as fashionable as ever.
The T2 was, as its name made clear, the second VW model, The first, of course, being the ubiquitous Beetle. VW was persuaded to make the new model by Ben Pon, a Dutch businessman and Beetle importer, who became a millionaire exporting Kombis to the United States. Pon got the idea from the motorised trolleys used to transport parts around a VW factory in Wolfsburg.
They were made from stripped down Beetle chassis, which lead to his sketch of a Beetle-based van, slightly resembling a box on wheels. A year later when Heinz Nordhoff became the Chief Executive of Volkswagen, he ran with Pon’s idea, and the first Type 2 VW van was launched at the Geneva Motor Show in November 1949, and went on sale the following year.
It was a stylish, if unexpected design: a scientifically streamlined utility vehicle with an air-cooled engine hidden under the floor at the back, and with the driver perched over the front wheels, and with nothing in front of the windscreen − holding a big, bus-style steering wheel.
The T2 thrummed along inexhaustibly, accompanied by its distinctive VW beat, at 60mph carrying up to a ton of people and goods while weighing little more itself. It was quiet inside, while the rear-mounted engine provided impressive traction, enabling the vehicle to pull away happily in sand or snow.
In 1967, as the Summer of Love played out, the T2 was given a facelift, losing its distinctive split-screen and gaining a single piece wraparound windscreen, plus a more powerful, 1600cc engine. In all other respects, it retained the original character, and was as popular as ever with police and ambulance services as it was with ranchers in South America and dropouts heading to the Age of Aquarius via Route 66.
Since 2006, water-cooled engines powered the Brazilian-made Kombis, with radiator grilles marring their once serene front ends. Still they sold, although no-one seems to know quite how many million T2s, split and single-screen, were made over those 63 years. And still, they feature in films as they had done for decades because they always look ineffably cool.
You can spot them, in fact, in as many as you can name in the time it took a T2 to reach 60mph. There’s Wait Until Dark, a thriller from 1967 starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. There’s Alan Arkin again in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine (a wonderful film). Magnum Force with Clint Eastwood, Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner, not forgetting Alice’s Restaurant from 1969 starring the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, nor 2013’s Argo by Ben Affleck, featuring six US embassy staff being smuggled out of Tehran by the Canadian secret service in a yellow-and-white Type 2 bus.
