This van is makin’ me thirsty.
I’ve always loved the look of the split screen kombi van. The front reminds me of some of those big old 1950’s rail freight locomotives. A Dutch car importer named Ben Pon is credited with the design after a visit to the factory at Wolfsburg in 1946. This is lifted from Wiki; “He first sketched the van in a doodle dated April 23, 1947,[13] proposing a payload of 690 kg (1,520 lb) and placing the driver at the very front”
“van in a doodle” sounds like a title of some Salvador Dali painting,
Anyway...
While I’ve never thought of the kombi as being the pinnacle of aerodynamics apparently the winscreen was deliberately split to achieve the ‘V’ shape to help reduce its drag coefficient(Cd). It’s claimed that the Kombi achieves a lower Cd than the Beetle! No way?!! Also the fact that VW actually tested the Kombi in a wind tunnel in the late 1940s surprised me. I’d just assumed wind tunnel testing of vehicles was a few years away and more for higher end vehicles initially.
From Wiki;
“Although the aerodynamics of the first prototypes were poor (with an initial drag coefficient of Cd=0.75),[8] engineers used the wind tunnel at the Technical University of Braunschweig to optimize the design. Simple changes such as splitting the windshield and roofline into a “vee” helped the production Type 2 achieve Cd=0.44, exceeding the Type 1’s Cd=0.48.[14] Volkswagen’s new chief executive officer Heinz Nordhoff (appointed 1 January 1948)[15] approved the van for production on 19 May 1949[8] and the first production model, now designated Type 2,[14] rolled off the assembly line to debut 12 November.[8”
Ok, a bit of dumbness from my youth; When I first got into VW, mainly Beetle, I assumed the ‘Type’ was a reference to the body style. So following this logic I just thought, the Beetle has one type of body style so T1, the Kombi had a van and ute so T2, now I know it had both duel and single cab variants but I just thought of those as ‘sub spieces’ of the ute. This left the Type 3 which had three body styles, the fastback, notchback and squareback. Of course this is wrong but it just made sense to me back then. Hey, I was young and the Internet didn’t excist yet!
This cast by Solido in 1:19 is of a 1966 model Kombi which is the second last year of the split windscreen era before the one piece ‘Bay window’ Kombi replaced it in 68. At least in Europe and the U.S, as it continued until 1975 in Brazil. Also of interest is production of the air-cooled rear engine Kombi van was only fairly recently stopped in Brazil on the 31 dec 2013. This is sad as it marked the end of an era of Porsche designed rear engined air cooled vehicles dating all the way back to 1935 with the original Beetle. *sniff sniff (dusty in here today)
On to the photos...
Only opening feature is the rear tailgate. The steering works but you would need fingers like E.T to access the steering wheel from the rear opening.
When I got this van out of the cabinet to take these photos I sadly noticed a lot of small white dots all over it. It looks like paint spatter but I don’t know how it got there as I’ve had it since new for over 20 years! Anyone know how to safely remove it? I’d assume it would be indoor house paint, probably water based.
There’s some nice details including the VW logos on the hub caps, seperate chrome lens surrounds and tiny chromed door handles. The large VW logo has been swapped for a Coke button, this seems to be modeled after actual vehicles used buy Coca-Cola back in the old days as I found some photos of Coke Kombis with these buttons on the front.
I think this van may have been overloaded at some point in it’s life. There’s not a lot of vehicles that can get away with this look but a swing axle VW is one of them, maybe not this much camber though?
Anyway I’m going to grab a Coke, want one?