Last winter, I shared a short gallery of Beetles in the snow, and it’s time to revisit the subject with another collection of air-cooled Wolfsburg machines in northern climates, making their way through wintery conditions. We’ll let the images tell the story this time: They cover VW products in a variety of situations, from daily commutes to leisure moments.
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I grew up in Wisconsin in the 60s. And yes VWs were great in the snow. However their great weakness was you could almost watch them rust. Road salt just ate them up. And winters then were so brutal that it was (almost) always too cold to wash them.
Indeed. And corrosion from the battery didn’t help. I know a guy that had the battery fall completely thru the floor pan after hitting a bump on the freeway! This was here in Oregon, but the car was from the midwest. And these are great in almost all conditions.
I had the same thing happen while in college. A roommate and I shared a 70 bug. Driving into a fast food restaurant one day I admired the car’s profile in a window reflection. Noticed a box like thing protruding under the car approximately under the back seat.
Upon investigation it was revealed that the battery had fallen through the floor and was hanging by the cables.
A quick fix was to cut a couple pieces of 1×4 wood to replace the rusted out floor. It remained that way for 3 more years until we sold the car.
Great in snow unless it was higher than your floor pan and the heavy, wet stuff. Then it was a boat.
What always fascinated me about air cooled engines in the winter was heating/defrosting them. I’ve heard some curse them and some say the heat from the exhaust manifolds through the ductwork was adequate if constantly maintained. They did have optional gas heaters as well. Today guys are using small Chinese diesel heaters under the hood piped into the ductwork that seem to work.
The whitetail deer on top of a Beetle feels totally incongruous to me. I’m sure it’s my own personal bias, but I have a mental link between deer hunting and rusty pickup trucks.
In the second-to-last photo, what’s the other vehicle? I want to say it’s a Mercedes-Benz ambulance conversion of some sort.
I’d say it’s a Mercedes-Benz W110-series with a Binz ambulance body.
Driving my 61 VW type 1 in the snow when most other people were getting stuck or crashing!;
And it was essential to have a “copilot” to get out and stand on the rear bumper when we needed more traction 😕.
Plus, hunting with a red plaid shirt and dungarees, instead of a full, matching deep woods camo Scent-Lok outfit.
I believe that in this era, camo clothing was the exclusive province of the military.
I posted a couple photos in the original article, one of my ’64 in the 1990s and one of my Mom and Dad’s ’58 in ’58. I’ll add one more of their Beetle here, with only a little snow left on the ground somewhere (I presume) in the N. GA mountains.
Great shots!
The first one really speaks to me as the car has BC plates, and looks to have been shot in the interior. It’s also a low trim model that I believe was intended for us (then) thrifty canucks. A friend had a ’60 for a winter beater and yes, we did take it skiing. With a pair of winter tread recap tires it would go damn near anywhere. True to type, it got so rusty it wasn’t safe to drive anymore. He traded it for a case of beer, which seemed like a good trade at the time.
Happy New Year to all from the great white north!
Great photos.
Old beetles look better in the snow than in the summer.
I wonder if any of those pics of the light tan ones are Ted Bundy?
Yep, you most definitely can keep your snow, as I look out my window at none.
My VW got caught out in an early snow this year. Note there are fallen leaves on top of the snow.
VW doesn’t look very happy about it but started right up to get back into the garage.
Even had my fav shown here. That “lil blue, K/G”!
Vdubs are fantastic in the snow. I have many memories of passing lines of stuck cars and I didn’t have winter tires (regular radials). My favorite memory is of a sunny Sunday morning after a pretty good snow storm in Baltimore; I took the VW out for a spin and ended up traversing the city two or three times, with the streets empty and to myself. It was is if a nuclear bomb had gone off and I was the only survivor. Well, there were plenty of kids playing in it.
Ain’t it grand? Passing 4×4 and luxury vehicles with chains rolling on threadbare bias plies uphill…
It was best to have a “copilot” to get out and ride the rest bumper in the icy spots.
Our poor little 1969 VW is barely visible under the drifted snow after a 1979 storm in Neenah, Wisconsin.
Picture #2 is from Hot Springs, Montana. The art-deco Florence Hotel burned down sometime in the early 1970s (not to be confused with the art-deco Florence Hotel in Missoula, which is still standing).
The local Detroit news reported on an unusual weather event: high winds pushed the water on Lake Erie to the east, exposing quite a bit of lakebed on the west end of the lake. Besides snowmobiles and outboard motors, this is said to be the remains of a Bug, that people had been using to pull people on skis around on the lake, during the winter of 1969.
We old phartz remember when this VW TV ad was new.
“TV commercial film for Volkswagen “Snow Plow” 1964″
Curious how the other end of a broom was being used in Photo #9. Perhaps retrofitted with an ice scraper. The Beetles definitely were awesome in snow, but I never had the opportunity to ride in one during the brutally cold Upper Midwest winters. If I had, I would likely have experienced the common complaint I heard from friends to expect cold feet with the heating and to give the driver a hand in scraping the inside windows from time to time during the trip.
Great cars in the snow once you accept that there is next to zero heat. That said, many a ski season I would take the front passenger seat out an load skis,boots and a season of ski clothes and head north.
Drag racing an Opel hearse? The VW would get there first but you’d wish you’d been driving the water-cooled Opel.
I had two Beetles in high school, a 60 and a 63. When we had a big snow in north eastern Indiana the first two cars to arrive in the school parking lot was mine and a 65 Karman Ghia driven by my English teacher. We parked side by side, both feeling pretty smug about easily getting through the snow, in my case partly on an unplowed county road – county roads didn’t get attention until after the state roads were cleared, later in the day.
This is how I remember it .
Sadly in ten years many if not most VW’s were rusted out .
-Nate
Beetles were great in snow, but we had a SAAB 96 which had roughly the same size tires, a similar flat belly, but front wheel drive. It not only would go anywhere, but the ability to pull the non-driving tires seemed to me to be better than pushing them. Propulsion and steering on the same end seemed to work out really well. More than once, I broke trail with my little SAAB, sometimes requiring a running start to get the front tires through a snow bank at the entrance to a parking lot, for example, and then pulling the car the rest of the way, often sliding on the belly as much as rolling on the wheels. And the SAAB had enough heat to warm a small house, so you could drive without having to wear a parka inside your car, and with that heat came defrosting capability such that you could always see, even in icing conditions. On the other hand, you couldn’t cut down a rusted-out SAAB into a dune buggy!
We depended upon our Beetles during winter in Chicago, so when I attended university in Colorado, Beetles got us to ski trips on weekends. While we had Valiants and other cheap rides, everyone else had a cheap Beetle. Problem was, no heat. We needed to eventually scrape the inside windshield with a bank or credit card. Especially on the return after we climbed back into them with wet, snow-covered bodies and equipment. The little wipers flapped and the vent windows were open as our humidity froze on the windows.
My father mounted a small fan in the upper left A pillar. It cleared a small patch. Other Beetles? One guy drove and the front passenger scraped.
Beetles depended upon engine heat to find its way from behind the back seat to the tiny ducts in the interior. However, the ducts rusted and the heat escaped through the Swiss cheese rust holes, stealing any warmth. Our Beetles weren’t new. They were rusty hulks that a university student could afford back then.
Few Beetle drivers had an interest in buying a new Beetle. Yet, I knew of two who purchased Super Beetles and delightfully, they had heat. LUXURY!
I eventually bought a rebuilt longblock for my ’64 and transferred all the tin and accessories over, including new heater boxes and hoses. For the first time, I had heat! Now this was in Georgia, so low temps might have been in the 20°s F, mind you. Problem was, while there was heat, there simply wasn’t enough of it. I could feel a bit of warmth on my ankles, and had a nice 6″ clear spot at either lower corner of the windscreen, but that was it. Still had to keep an ice scraper handy for use inside.
At least that was better than my previous ’71 Campmobile (tin-top van), which had no heat at all (j-tubes instead of heater boxes, as the plumbing to the cabin had long ago rotted away). I kept an old wool army blanket handy as a lap robe for cold weather.
My old beetles, buses and fastbacks went well over snowy and muddy fire roads in the Angeles National Forest in So.Cal back in the day. Rust wasn’t an issue there, heaters worked well, although the bus could only keep the cab warm with the curtains blocking off the back of the bus. Would go where the 4 wheel drives would venture.