How Volkswagen kept us on a leash for 21 years
With the Volkswagen ID Buzz, the brand fulfills a long-ago promise: the first Transporter, the T1 would one day return as a retro bus. As early as 2001, Volkswagen showed the Microbus. However, it had a very fat VR6 engine. Very different from the ID Buzz’s electric powertrain that recently hit the market. How Volkswagen kept us on a leash for 21 years.
When you tell your children in the spring that Sinterklaas is approaching, you are asking an unreasonable amount of their patience. In the same way, Volkswagen kept enthusiasts on the line with the car that would only become their new original van after years.
Restoration companies
It’s always nice to be able to embrace childhood friends. It would only be very strange if they had not aged as much as yourself, but were still in the very condition in which they had settled in your memory. A utopia? Of course – barring the dubious blessings of botox – but with cars it can be done with impunity. And we want to, which is why we ask restoration companies to smooth out the wrinkles and dents of our old creatures.
Microbus came half a century after T1
We also enjoy modern casts of our childhood heroes. Especially when they were everyone’s friends, like the earliest Volkswagen vans. Roughly half a century after the Type 1 appeared on the market, mother Volkswagen unveiled a study model that consciously linked to the atmosphere and appearance of its famous great-grandfather. This Microbus had to tell the world in 2001 that the VW designers had not forgotten the creation of such a vehicle. They built it based on the Transporter and it really wasn’t going to hit the market.
Dieuwertje Blok
Subsequently, the car was announced as often as announced over the years, in the way in which Dieuwertje Blok reports in the Sinterklaas news with feigned panic that the parcel boat is about to sink and therefore will not, or will, or will not arrive. On the timeline of autoweek.nl you can find messages about the definitive arrival of the Microbus (‘he is coming!’) from successively 2004, 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2017.
Bulli as a study model
In between there was also the Bulli, also a study model that turned things upside down, but also did not bring it to series production. Because that was the fate of the Microbus: it served no other purpose than to present the public with a fat sausage. And that lasted so long that he got moldy and had to make way. In the end, a clean slate appeared, with a very tasty vegan snack: the electric ID Buzz. Yet Dieuwertje remains in the picture, because do all those ordered Buzzjes arrive in your shoes on time, children?
Technical data Volkswagen Microbus
Engine VR6, petrol
Displacement 3,189 cc
Max. power 170 kW/232 hp at 6,200 rpm
Max. torque 320 Nm at 2,900 rpm
Dimensions (lxwxh) 4,720 x 1,910 x 1,900 mm
Weight 2,225 kg
0-100 km/h 10.5 sec
Top speed 205 km/h
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl