The car was a hideous turquoise. But the garish color did compel me to look at the 1965 Volkswagen Beetle parked there in the middle of the auction-house floor – surrounded by some of its parts.
The car was someone’s stalled weekend restoration project, waiting now for someone else to take it over. The previous owner had stripped the car down and was apparently in the process of putting it back together again. The paint job had been finished (someone actually chose this color!). The car resembled the hollowed-out shell of a house without walls or furniture.
The Beetle was being sold recently at one of my favorite auction houses. As I examined it from front to rear, one auction-goer mentioned that his friend had about a dozen Volkswagens in various states of repair and might like to have this one. The friend was hoping to sell them to finance his retirement.
So, dutifully, he called up the friend on his cell phone. I could hear him describing the car and the friend asking questions, which he could not answer. Then he went in search of the auction sheet with the information about the car.
So did I, and here’s how it was described:
“1965 Volkswagen Restoration Project
1965 Volkswagen project car that needs to simply be put back together. Body and paint work have been completed, solid floors and heater channels, 1776cc engine with Dellorto carb, and many parts, including seats, seals, trim, glass (rear pop out window!), accessories. The rear fenders are not pictured but we do have them. The title has been lost, so the owner will apply for another. This can take up to 8 weeks. This is really a great car to tinker with and all the difficult work is done!”
This Volkswagen brought back memories for me. My best friend’s boyfriend had an orange Volkswagen Beetle when we were in college in the early 1970s. It seemed back then that most of the VWs on the road were that color (I later had a college boyfriend who also had an orange VW). I’m sure it was a used car, and he probably paid no more than a couple hundred dollars for it because we were poor college students.
I remember us sputtering around in that old metal car (it seems like a heavy metal car compared to the fiberglass cars we have today) around Augusta, GA, where we were students at Paine College. It was sputtering, because the car was a stick shift and I can still see him struggling to change the gears. I don’t recall it being a very smooth ride, but we were students and things like that didn’t really matter.
While the VW Beetle was very popular in the 1970s, we were late coming to it. The first prototypes of the car were designed in the 1930s by Ferdinand Porsche. An automobile engineer, Porsche wanted to build a popular small car. When Adolf Hitler came into power in Germany, he had the same idea: He wanted a car that would hold two adults and three children and speed up to 62 mph.
He solicited Porsche to design the car, and the first prototypes of what would later be called the Beetle were produced in the late 1930s. The design was based on a car called the Tatra, a streamlined car with a rear motor that had been made by the Czechs. The VW bug entered the American market around 1949.
Volkwagen stopped making the Beetle in 2003, and a total of 21 million had been produced. The company set the car’s birth year as 1945,when the Hitler regime stopped financing it. Volkswagen the company began production of the revamped New Beetle in 2003.
The 1965 Beetle was different from the previous versions: It had larger windows, contoured seats and a better heater. It came with a 40-horsepower, four-cylinder 1200cc engine and a four-speed transmission. For comfort, it had sun visors, a coat hook, assist straps, overhead light, luggage space under the hood and an automatic windshield washer.
It sold for around $1,500.
Bringing an old VW back to its original look seems to be a favorite pastime. I came across several websites on rebuilding the car, a how-to manual – which appears to be “the” book on the subject – on how to restore it, videos on how to rebuild certain parts of the car and sites on where to buy parts.
During the auction, the house’s car expert noted that he was a VW restorer, and tried to coax buyers into bidding higher on the car. He said it was worth $15,000. None of the bidders were accepting his estimate at face value, though.
The auctioneer started high, but no one was biting, until he dropped the starting bid to $200. The car sold for $2,500. In my research, I found 1965 Volkswagens selling for $900 to $19,500 on one auto search site. According to the website, the average price was around $6,200.
At $2,500, maybe this was a good buy for that weekend tinkerer, whom I’m sure has his own Volkswagen story. I’d love to hear yours.
