You know a car hits it big when it can be recognized by its silhouette. This is definitely true for cars like the Chevy Belair and the Ford Mustang, but it is also true of an unassuming underpowered bus made by Volkswagen in the mid-20th century. While it was in production in the 1950s, it hit waves literally in the US in the hippie and surfer communities, used as transporters or even makeshift mobile homes. Since the bus’s production ended in 1992, the imagery and reality of the bus have been resigned to the past and the enthusiasts who collected these vehicles. Yet the recent release by Volkswagen, its EV bus called the ID Buzz, is looking back into the past to look towards the future.
The T1s (and later T2s) was a left-field sort of car. While Detroit’s major automakers were producing boat-like cars with roaring engines, the T1 was absorbed into the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With simple construction, easy customizability, and a compact and spacious duality of car, it made it the perfect transporter car, becoming a crossover of sorts before cars like crossovers or minivans existed. A slow but steady bus, often nicknamed later on as a bread loaf, had its image defined by the people who bought and drove them. Surfers going to catch waves on the sunny beaches of southern California or hippies hitching a ride to counter-culture areas like San Francisco labeled the bus as an alternative, not something the average American would purchase.
Yet the people that did purchase these buses created just enough of a lucrative market for Volkswagen. The bus’s iconic loaf-like shape changed during the third generation redesign, rounding the bus and softening the corners, trying to create a few aerodynamic coefficients that would make the gas cost and the actual driving experience more tolerable. Yet even with these alterations, the T3 bus couldn’t meet emission standards and regulations. Combined with Volkswagen’s desire to make cars with a higher profit margin, the bus that defined the free-spirited movement of surfer bums and hippies disappeared.
The new round of VW bus called the ID Buzz takes the design features — two-tone paneling and oversized VW badging — mimics the appearance of the T1 and T2s of the 60s and 70s. Yet the similarities kind of stop short of that. The loafy appearance takes on more of a classic van shape, which has a front that is pointed, diminishing the drag that made the older generations’ flat-faced front inefficient. This electric vehicle has some giddy up, with an engine that accelerates the van to 60 mph in 6.6 seconds and can brake from 60 mph in 121 feet, much quicker than comparative minivans in its class.
These improvements come at a cost. One of the main selling features of the original VW buses was their affordability, about $21,000 in today’s money, but the new ID Buzz’s lowest option starts at around $59,000, far from the free peace and roar budgets of hippies both then and now.
While the car is well-received and is reported to be an easy-to-drive EV, it’s hard to jump on the bandwagon. The easy accessibility with the original bus’s price point was part of its appeal, and having it so out of reach loses the message of what the van stood for.
Do you think this van is a good homage to the Volkswagen vans of the past?