I stumbled into this little short film which gives a view out the back window on a typical stretch of autobahn in the mid-60s, including some very impatient drivers. The BMW New Class (1500/1800) behind the red VW shows that the stereotype about BMW drivers was formed early.
The second half unfortunately has very little traffic. The second half is quite familiar to me, as it starts just at the north end of the Europabrucke, on the Brenner Pass autobahn just outside Innsbruck. I’ve driven that stretch quite a few times, including getting on that very short on ramp at 2:12.
Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn
This reminded me of the Kraftwerk tune.
Neat video, thanks for sharing it!
Quite a parade of cars going by! The most interesting is the “baroque angel” BMW.
Triumph 2000 MK1 at the start.
Seems like the impatient drivers were the Comet and the Chevy, not the Germans.
Comet and Chevy?!? What Comet and Chevy? You mean the germane Ford Taunus and Opel Rekord? I can assure you that a Comet or Chevy would have looked quite a bit bigger compared to most of those cars.
The most impatient driver clearly was the BMW behind the red VW. Stereotypes were formed early.
Heilige scheisse, that on-ramp at about 2.10 is mighty short! No wonder they invented the 300SL, though even it wouldn’t suffice here.
I can only speculate that that part of the autobahn wasn’t unlimited, surely?
I checked, and that is the Europabrucke, near Innsbruck. Yes there most certainly is a speed limit (100kmh). The video below, a modern one, shows that same on-ramp still there, at 2:25. But there’s three lanes, and the right one is undoubtedly used mostly by trucks.
The terrain made that ramp necessary. It connects to the little town up there. I’ve actually driven on that ramp when I spent 6 weeks there in 2000. We were staying in a little village right near there. I had no big trouble finding a hole in traffic.
“A picture is never older than the newest car”:
VW with flat hubcaps at 1:23 from August 1967 (1968 model).
Upright headlamps from 1967.
Correction: Flat hubcaps from Aug. 1965 (1966 model).
And new bumpers from Aug 1967 (68 model).
Thanks for posting that video. My recollection was, back in that timeframe, the Ford 17M/20M was the everyman hotshoe car. Those V4 & V6’s were fairly powerful and absolutely indestructible. If you recall, the German’s were nowhere near as polite or laid back as the Austrians on the Autobahn. Couple aggressive driving habits with no speed limits, and you really had to bring your A game with you. Especially as a tourist.
On that note, we rented a BMW 525i Automatic in ’94, and merging onto the Autobahn with that car was absolutely terrifying. Short on ramps, fast moving traffic, and a car that really didn’t begin to move until the revs built up combined to guarantee a white knuckle experience.
My memories of a fair number of transcontinental trips as a boy in the 70’s in the back of my dad’s Audi Super 90, then a Ford Consul, then an Audi 100 basically consisted of strict adherence to the speed limit until the entrance to the A5 near Freiburg, then once merged onto the Autobahn, absolute hammer down until either traffic, the need for gasoline, or a speed limit after a border crossing into a different country forced a speed reduction but the prime objective was to make progress. Good times, especially since he preferred to run at night with a huge set of Hella halogen driving lights on the front.
The Ford Taunus P5 (1964-1967) was available with the new 2.0 L V6, and it was by far the cheapest six cylinder on the market. With 85 or 90hp, it was the Road Runner of Germany of the time.
This 1970 Nurburgring footage has lots of roof landings and VW’s.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D0xwc54G2Ur8&ved=2ahUKEwiRvZq0iYndAhVbJjQIHX-lBscQtwIwBHoECAMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2McfbZSK3vosOm_KvRTvx1
Hey, that’s almost better than the footage in the post! Excellent stuff.
If anyone is wondering why rear-engined cars were labelled as death traps even in the ’50s (even before the Corvair), look at this. So many VWs, NSUs, Renaults, Fiats and Simcas ending up on the roof…
The mid-engine cars (VW 914, Matra M530) don’t flip over quite so much. Granted, a few front-engined RWD cars also go upside down, but very few by comparison.
If you painted a white line down the middle of the Nurburgring and had traffic coming the other way it would be like a lot of the roads here, The only good thing about VWs was you usually survive a rollover and plastic buggy bodies would bolt onto the remnants and your away again.
Amazing. I’ve just given it a full post.
The BMW New Class (1500/1800) behind the red VW shows that the stereotype about BMW drivers was formed early.
The one tailgating, who shifts sideways to see if the other lane is obstructed? The most common, aggressive, tailgaters around here are in either a big pickup or big SUV, though some people driving almost anything. and almost everyone on I-696, regardless of vehicle, drives like that.
Had an incident a couple years ago. I was driving down Cherry Hill with a woman in a big Mercedes sedan behind me. Had one of those edge of consciousness hunches that the Merc’s headlights had flashed. I checked my speed and I was going the limit, 45. Watched a bit closer and, yes, the Merc’s headlights flashed again. I responded with a classic gesture visible through the rear window, and the headlight flashing stopped.
Short on ramps. In the 1980s there was still an onramp at 68th St onto US 131 south of Grand Rapids that ran down the hill from 68th parallel, but in the opposite direction, to 131. At the bottom of the hill, the onramp made a 180 degree hairpin turn and ended with next to no acceleration lane due to the obstruction of the 68th St bridge abutment.
I-94, as originally built, topped 131. In Jackson the onramp from Cooper St to westbound 94 had a stop sign.
In this pic, you can see where the old onramp came down the embankment to meet 94.
Looking back toward where the onramp came down the embankment on the left, from about where the stop sign was, you can see how little distance the driver of the merging car could see oncoming traffic. I presume the highway engineer that designed this decided to put the stop sign there so the driver could take a good long look at the oncoming traffic, before venturing onto the highway. What was the 0-60 time of a 1960 Falcon or Corvair, which were new when this onramp was built?
0-60 times always crack me up as to why you think they are important, I have a fairly slow Hillman four that hits merging speed on the onramps of the local expressway and I often get get held up by modern cars when speeding up to merge, nobody uses the lightning fast acceleration available in performance cars.
I-94 South of the Kalamazoo-Battle Creek area constantly makes news here in West Michigan. Although this is a winter storm and worse than most. It made the headlines here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg8Iec-uG_c
Bob
I-94 South of the Kalamazoo-Battle Creek area constantly makes news here in West Michigan.
Ayup. I grew up in Kalamazoo and have more experience with lake effect snow than I would wish on anyone. iirc, the crash in your clip was just west of Battle Creek. There have been a lot of similar wrecks on 94 from BC into Indiana. I got caught in a lake effect squall driving back to Motown from Kazoo. Highway completely snow covered. Visibility maybe 100′. I was puttering along at about 45, just close enough to see the taillights of the Neon ahead of me. A big Mercedes blew past me on the inside lane, driving like the road was clear and dry. I saw that Merc again a couple minutes later. He had spun and was facing west in the eastbound lane. How he had spun that thing without hitting another car, or the median wall that extends from Kazoo to Gailsburg, I’ll never know.
Nice piece of film. Thanks fro reminding us what a great place the Austrian Alps are!
One other stereotype confirmed is that of drivers who stay in the outer lane even when not passing. In Europe, where passing is always on the outside unless queuing, long platoons can build of wannabe faster drivers afraid to lose their place in the line and be unable to re-enter it when actually necessary. In fact, you’re just as quick without having to drive bumper to bumper to move into the (almost) empty middle lane.
The entry ramp and entry point are, to current specs, very tight indeed
And how many of those cars are German?
Move over to the rightmost lane, please. Middle lane hoggers (Mittelspurschleicher) are the bane of my Autobahn driving, since A) my Corsa isn’t fast enough for the left lane, the territory of BMWs, but B) I’m still going faster than all those sticking to the middle next to an empty right lane, for fear of potentially getting stuck behind a lorry. It renders the rightmost lane nearly unusable unless you undertake illegally, and it’s in fact my main frustration on the road.
Neat footage. I note the dashed lane line is yellow rather than white after the camera car gets on at the short on-ramp @ 2:12, which is interesting between two lanes going the same direction. I also note what looks like blue exhaust smoke from the camera car as the driver boots it to get up to speed after that short on-ramp).
Wow nice roads I think we have around 200kms of dual carriageway scattered through the whole country but in the 60s the was about 20kms in Auckland that was it. The rest is two lanes it twists and turns head on collisions are a regular event and offs are common. But the keep me awake on long shifts I dont really like long straight clogged with traffic motorways.
I may have posted this before, but it’s a good place to repost. In December of 1967, as an 18 year old, I hitchhiked from south Wales to Salzburg to meet up with friends for a week’s skiing. It seems a bit mad now, and I still marvel that my parents back in Canada were also (probably reluctantly) OK with it. All I can say is that ‘times were different’.
My memories of the UK and France portions of the trip are mostly two-or-three-lane ordinary roads, but that changed in Germany.
Growing up in Canada in the post-war period I shared the fairly widespread perception on this site of the Atlantic that Europe in general was quaint, a bit backward, fairly poor, and generally not ‘modern’. Standing just off a motorway somewhere near Karlsruhe though, and watching the cars rush by at 100 kmh+, I remember thinking, ‘The cars are a little smaller, but from this angle Germany looks very much like the USA’. It was an eye-opener.
That looks a lot like a Trabant right near the beginning between the big BMW (EMW?) and the VW Cabriolet (with the roof up). Could it be?
That’s a VW Type 3 (1500/1600) sedan, just like we had a CC on here recently.
That is most certainly a BMW and not an EMW, which never made a comparable model like this one.
Trabants, EMWs and any other East German cars were extremely rare on this side of the Iron Curtain, as they were not exported commonly, at least at this time. I can’t remember ever seeing a Trabi on the roads in the West before 1989 or so. East Germans were obviously not allowed to drive one on vacation to the West, as it would inevitably be a one-way trip.
VW Type 3.
What is this extremely beautiful car?
Ford Taunus P5
I almost mistook it for a Toyota Corona
German plates from Gelsenkirchen. Here’s a link to a brochure.
http://storm.oldcarmanualproject.com/ford20m1966.htm
I caught the smoke puffs on that too, makes me wonder if our film car was a 2 stroker DKW?