You also really wanted to double-clutch my 1955 Speedster.

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Someday I will have a VW bug again. I learned a lot of trivia from this video.

My first car was a 1970 in faded yellow with the slap-stick transmission and a 1600 engine.

Käfer more appropriately translates as "Beetle," but I'll always think of it as "the Bug." Read the rest

Three hundred and fifty bucks doesn't seem unreasonable for this kids' electric VW T1 Camper Van. The red-and-white two-seater IS an officially licensed product, so it may be of decent quality. Not only does it have working head and tail lights but it also goes forward and in reverse. It can only handle up to 110 lbs., so grownups will just have to get a real one (or get this T1 fridge).

(The Awesomer) Read the rest

To date, Volkswagen has bought back about 350,000 diesel vehicles in the wake of the massive environmental fraud they committed around emissions testing. Here's one of 37 VW graveyards. Read the rest

This LEGO Camper Van is far more accessible than the VW branded one.

Growing up in Southern California instilled a love of all things camper van in me. My daughter loves our VW Westy so much that she cried when I suggested selling the ol' bus last year.

There were peals of joy when she saw this kit!

LEGO Creator Sunshine Surfer Van 31079 Building Kit (379 Piece) via Amazon Read the rest

Oliver Schmidt, the general manager of Volkswagen's Michigan environmental and engineering office, is going to jail for his role in Dieselgate, the company's criminal conspiracy to trick regulators about the emissions from their diesel cars, allowing them to emit lethal levels of NOx on roads all over the world. Read the rest

In Impact of excess NOx emissions from diesel cars on air quality, public health and eutrophication in Europe, published today in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from Norway, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands estimate that 5,000 early European deaths per year attributable to diesel emissions are caused by Volkswagen's Dieselgate crime, in which cars were designed to sneak lethal levels of toxic emissions past regulatory checks. Read the rest

Nope, this circa 1976 VW camper van hasn't just been tipped over. It was built this way.

This is the Trippy Tippy Hippy Van and it's the latest crazy race car creation by Maryland police officer and mechanic Jeff Bloch AKA Speedycop. To make it, the van was mounted on top of another vehicle, a 1998 VW Rabbit. He and his team spent over 1000 hours, in just five weeks, to get the sideways van ready for the racetrack. Amazingly, it does zero to 60 in eight seconds!

Bloch, known for his unusual vehicle builds, explains how he came up with the idea for the Trippy Tippy Hippy Van:

The idea came to me—as so many other bad ideas do — by simply wondering how to make something totally conventional into something far more creative and entertaining to watch. Our previous builds were based on the same premise. What if a plane could be made into a racecar? We built the Spirit of LeMons, a ’56 Cessna 310, into a totally reliable street/track car that handles incredibly well, despite the mundane ’87 Toyota van base. I chose that particular model van because it uses a mid-engine/RWD setup and torsion bars in the front, which made for a low center of gravity, and left no strut towers protruding from the narrow fuselage. What if we did it again, but with a helicopter? Most helicopters have quite rounded bodies and use narrow skids, so even if a fuselage could somehow be sourced cheaply enough, neither would hide the chassis of even a small vehicle inside.

In the 1990s, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Daimler and other German auto-makers formed a secret pact to price-fix a diesel emissions control substance called AdBlue, according to Der Spiegel, who cites memos from those meetings that VW and Daimler have sent to German competition enforcers. Read the rest

Cut & Shut is the latest work by illustrator Chris Labrooy, showing whimsical imaginings of icon VW Beetles and other models come to life. Read the rest

I know what you're probably thinking and, nope, this isn't a concept design for a refrigerator that looks like a Volkswagen Bus. They actually made a VW Bus fridge!

This stylish kitchen icebox is a collaboration between Volkswagen and Gorenje, a Slovenian manufacturer of large home appliances.

Gorenje Retro Special Edition Refrigerator, modelled by the legendary Volkswagen van T1 from the 50's, also termed as the 'Bulli', will undoubtedly revoke a notion of the decade with its pastel blue or Bordeaux red colours and smooth, rounded edges. Besides giving your home a touch of retro, it will win your heart with its practicality and the latest technology, making it an indispensable item of your kitchen setting.

This is what it looks like in "Bordeaux red" (swoon):

(Foodiggity, Yanko Design)

Previously: A Volkswagen microbus tent, for camping or just hanging out Read the rest

Starting with an off-the-shelf model of a VW microbus, Hernandez Dreamphography creates Inner Trip, a diorama of a weathered VW on a wintry field. Read the rest

AirMapp is a great channel of rescued and refurbished VW vans. They found a 1955 panel van abandoned for decades in the mountains. At first they planned to tow it to a shop, but then they decided to take the parts up the mountain. Very satisfying ending. Read the rest

A report in BILD am Sonntag claims that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has uncovered the secret test that Audis were programmed to perform to determine whether to pollute like crazy or to pretend that they were low-polluting, legally compliant vehicles. Read the rest

In Lock It and Still Lose It—On the (In)Security of Automotive Remote Keyless Entry Systems, a paper given at the current Usenix Security conference in Austin, researchers with a proven track record of uncovering serious defects in automotive keyless entry and ignition systems revealed a technique for unlocking over 100,000 million Volkswagen cars, using $40 worth of hardware; they also revealed a technique for hijacking the locking systems of millions of other vehicles from other manufacturers. Read the rest

An internal Volkswagen corporate PowerPoint presentation from 2006 outlined how to trick emissions tests -- and the result of that plan to cheat environmental protections, governments, and the people who bought and drove those cars is now known as “Dieselgate.” Read the rest

Reuters reports that VW is about to tell the federal judge in San Francisco in charge of its case that it will offer to buy back nearly half a million of its diesel vehicles from owners who were deceived about the cars' emission standards and performance when the company engineered its cars so that they would act daemonically, performing differently based on whether they were being tested or not. Read the rest