Myth: They're cold!
Rant: Yes, they sure can be. But it wasn't always so.
Being air-cooled, old VWs don't have a reservoir of very hot water to draw from when it comes time to warm up the cabin. So what they did was built a box around a big chunk of the exhaust system (and see below for another myth relating to this). That box's purpose is to get the air it held really hot and send it into the cabin on demand. They're called 'heat exchangers' or 'heater boxes'.
Off the showroom floor, there was nothing wrong with this system. I spent a few Nebraska Winters driving around a friend's nice 1971 Beetle and can attest that I was often turning the heater down. The earlier Type III's heaters worked so well that VW had to replace some of its plastic components with metal ones, as the plastic parts were getting melted by the heater.
So what went wrong? There're a few problems. One, if there are any leaks in the ductwork between the heat exchangers and the cabin, heat pours out the car. Two, if the car itself isn't sealed well, heat is lost that way too (my buddy's '71 was about watertight). Most cars probably have a combination of these two problems. In many cases, the problem is magnified by greater expectations. That is, if you're the kind of lazy person who expects to be able to adjust your car's heater to the degree, and by each area of the cabin, then you're not going to be satisfied by anything an old VW can offer you in the way of heat, or likely otherwise. Get a Chrysler, and good riddance.
In a water-cooled car, if you have a leak in the heating system you lose coolant and the car alerts you to this, one way or another, because a coolant leak will eventually kill it. In an air-cooled car, if you have a leak in the heating system you just have an anemic heater. Multiply this by millions of old Volkswagens rusting and leaking their way through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and you've got the making of a piece of common 'knowledge' on your hands. But the fact is that a properly maintained ACVW heating system works just fine.
Myth: The best option for a distributor in an air-cooled Volksie is a Bosch 009. John Muir said so.
I'm not nearly enough of a mechanic to explain it properly, so I'll simply say this: if Volkswagen AG thought your ACVW would've done well with a 009 on it, they'd've put one on it and saved millions of dollars a year doing so. (Remember, the primary purpose of a car company isn't to make cars, it's to make money.) So why didn't they? Because VW had determined that the 009 wasn't appropriate for any ACVW.
To put it another way, fitting a 009 to your car on John Muir's advice means you're betting that one guy--one guy who never designed any vehicle from the ground up in his life--was able to outthink however many dozen engineers VW had assigned to the matter of how to best distribute the ignition spark in their cars. That's not a smart bet. (By the way, you're making the same bet if you trust your local 009-advising mechanic.)
Myth: An old Volkswagen--especially a bus--is a slow piece of transportation, and that's just the way they are.
Rant: No, it isn't.
While the very earliest Beetles and Buses were no doubt slow, air-cooled VWs steadily got speedier as the years went on. They had to! No American was going to buy a car that couldn't keep up on the interstates that were being laid down all over the place at the time. By the 1960s a stock Beetle was fast enough to maintain reasonable freeway speeds--over 70mph. Buses being much heavier were also much slower: splitty buses could never be expected to top 65mph, but it was acceptable because people had different ideas about how trucks could perform versus cars back then. After the Type IV engine debuted in 1972 the bus's top speed jumped to nearly 80mph. Type IIIs were consistently the fastest of the pack and by the 1970s had top speeds over 80mph.
What we need to remember is that VW always considered their vehicles' top speed to be their cruising speed (don't believe me? Look at any ACVW owner's manual). In other words, they are designed to go as fast as they can. They are, after all, dressed down Porsches. Load affects these figures of course, but the point remains.
It's a curious thing that so many owners simply accept that their VW can't go very fast, like over 55mph, when the people who built the car are telling them that it can go much faster. I assume these same people would return a brand-new Toyota to the dealer if Toyota told them it could go 115mph but theirs had trouble going much over 80. Why would they then think their late bay window bus is just fine if it can't get over 60mph? A car's failure to be able to do what the owner's manual says it should be able to do is a sign that something's wrong with it, whether that car is a 1960 VW Beetle, a 1976 VW Bus, a 1953 Nash Rambler, a 1997 Honda Accord, or a 2011 Toyota Corolla.
Why do so many ACVW owners simply shrug off poor performance, the same poor performance that would send them back to the dealer in a fit were the car a 2011 Toyota instead of a 1975 VW? The answer is probably worth another rant altogether, so right now I'll just mention that I think it can be boiled down to one thing: hippie wannabes.
All that said, and this is important, I don't advocate driving your ACVW at top speed, at all times. I cannot make that clear enough. If someone doesn't want to go 78mph in their Westy, they shouldn't. But they should be able to, and that's the point. If they can't, and they're just accepting their VW's below-par performance as intrinsic to the make, then they are more or less slowly destroying the car. Period.
Myth: Four bolts and a floor jack! That's all it takes to remove a VW engine.
Rant: Beetle engines are pretty easy to take out compared to just about any other car engine, true, but unless you want a real mess you'd better undo all the wiring, the fuel lines, the heater cables, and the accelerator cable too. Take the engine compartment seal out first while you're at it so you don't wreck it. Late Bay Window Bus and Type III engines are more involved still.
That's not to say it can't be done pretty freakin' quickly:
That's not to say it can't be done pretty freakin' quickly:
Myth: Yeah, I have one of those VW buses with the Porsche engine in it.
Rant: More like a bunch of people have Porsches with VW engines in them.
Volkswagen's Type IV engine was installed, with variations in setup, in the VW 411 and 412, the Porsche 914/4 (sold under the marque VW-Porsche everywhere except North America), the 1976 Porsche 912E, and the 1972-1979 VW Type II (bus). The mention of all these Porsches in relation to the lowly VW bus is too much for some to resist, and so the connection gets strengthened and offered as some esoteric bit of counterintuitive information, typically by the same kind of people who insist that we only use 10% of our brains, or that engineers can't explain how bumblebees can fly.
In fact the Type IV engine was engineered wholly by VW. Sure, the VW and Porsche engineering camps were pretty incestuous; Porsche might've helped VW with it, just like they helped VW with almost everything (and vice versa). It found its way into a couple Porsches basically as an afterthought.
Myth: Volkswagen was so stupid: the heat for the occupants is from the exhaust!
Rant: The heated air that gets (or should get; see above) pumped into the cabin is warmed by the exhaust, but it's not exhaust air. Do you really think anyone could drive ten minutes in an old VW with the heat on without dying if the heating air was actually exhaust?
I don't doubt, however, that there have been plenty of cases where unattended exhaust leaks have found their way into the cabin via the heater. But you can't blame Volkswagen's design if you can't be bothered to keep up with basic repairs and maintenance.
Myth: Hitler designed the VW Beetle.
Rant: Ugh! Even one of my all-time heroes, Cecil Adams, went a little ways to perpetuate this nonsense.
VW's Nazi origins are well-known, but all the evidence shows that Hitler himself did nothing more for the Beetle than (a) specify certain of its specifications: it had to have decent mileage and be made cost-effectively so that most German families could afford one; (b) bankroll its design and production; (c) ensure that roads would be built to drive it on. Mechanically, it was a product of Ferdinand Porsche's mind. The body style was basically a rip-off of the Tatra, a Czech car from the early '30s.
Myth: Volkswagens don't leak oil, they mark their spot!
Rant: This is another little nugget of received 'wisdom' that has unfortunately wormed its way into the ACVW collective unconscious.
Initial VW owners were astonished at the engine's disdain for oil. Consumption of a pint (not a quart, a pint) per 5,000 miles was considered out of hand in the 1950s and 1960s. So why do so many VW's drool oil all over the place now?
Volkswagen AG hasn't built an air-cooled flat-four engine in almost thirty years, that's why. I'd be amazed if a quarter of ACVWs on the road today--in the US at least--are still being pushed around by an original VW-built or VW-remanufactured powerplant. Things got especially bad in the late 1970s through the mid-1990s when old VWs were basically considered disposable and budget engine builders came to corner the lion's share of the market. After all, nobody in 1986, say, was going to shell out the $2800 then necessary to put a well-built engine in a Beetle they'd paid $175 for (I remember in the early 1990s when I got into the scene, you could still buy a turnkey Type I engine from certain low-rent builders for less than a thousand dollars). All those crappy engines came to be the prime movers of most of the ACVWs on the roads today, and at this point the ones which haven't died leak a lot of oil. Of course the budget engine builders have given up only a little bit of their market share since then, so crappy, leak-prone engines are still getting bolted into ACVWs every day.
But they shouldn't be. Just as we shouldn't accept sub-par performance as part of ownership, we shouldn't accept oil leaks. Find out where the oil's coming from, and fix it. And when you need to rebuild, get it done by someone who doesn't believe it's simply a fact of life that ACVW engines leak oil--and that should include you if you do it yourself.
Myth: Buses handle like waterbeds. Oh well, it's just part of their charm.
Rant: Bullshit. Fit light truck tires (load range D) to your bus like Volkswagen's engineers ask you to, and keep yourself and everyone else a little safer.
Myth: I live in Southern California/Nevada/Arizona/Florida, so I yanked that thermostat right out. What's the point?
Rant: The point is that one shouldn't anthropomorphize oil. Just because you feel warm or hot doesn't mean your oil does; "hot" (and "cold") means one thing when it comes to people, and another when it comes to oil.
The thermostat's job is to force cooling air to bypass the oil cooler at start-up so the oil gets up to operating temperature as quickly as it can. Cold oil doesn't lubricate as well as warm oil, so the longer it stays cool the more damage is done to the engine. Even if you just started up your ACVW in Phoenix and it's 110F, the oil is still too cool--for a few minutes anyway--to be lubricating everything as well as it should. Put the thermostat back on.
