Seventy years after its first model rolled off the factory line, Volkswagen AG (VW) is reinventing the VW bus, symbol of the hippy movement, for today’s climate-conscious generation — but some of its former afficionados remain to be convinced.
The German automaker on Wednesday unveiled the camper’s latest iteration, known as the ID.Buzz, part of the flagship ID line with which Volkswagen is leading a multibillion-euro charge into the electric vehicle market.
Reviving the “icon” was a “priority,” VW chief executive officer Herbert Diess said in a question-and-answer session on the online forum Reddit.
Photo: AFP
The new model, with its curvy resemblance to the original VW campers that had their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, was a “turning point” for Volkswagen, Center for Automotive Research director Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer said.
The design classic was the inspiration of Dutch importer Ben Pon, whose eye was caught by an employee-built transport vehicle, when he visited the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg in 1947.
Following his eureka moment, Pon drafted the first plans and convinced VW to start production in March 1950, christening its second model after the Beetle.
The chubby camper, a symbol of liberty and free-thinking, was particularly successful in the US, where it was embraced by the Californian surfer community.
The bus has become a pop culture mainstay, transporting Scooby-Doo through his adventures, as well as the cast of the cult independent film Little Miss Sunshine. Volkswagen is hoping to build on the camper’s positive image.
The bus which “contributed to the history of the flower power movement” is now the vehicle “for the Fridays for Future generation” and “hippies of the climate crisis,” Dudenhoeffer said.
However, inning over classic van-owners to the new electric model might prove to be a little harder.
The ID.Buzz has “taken on the V-shape” on the bonnet of the original T1 camper, said Melanie Wolf, 33, a member of a VW Bus-lovers club in Bavaria.
With her partner Tobias Toplak, 43, she regularly hits the open road in her 1973 camper van model, most recently taking it on a tour of Norway.
“I am interested to see how Volkswagen pulls off the mash-up between the hipster world and the Bulli mindset,” said Tobias, using the camper’s affectionate German nickname.
The spirit of “liberty and independence” on four wheels is difficult to match with the limited autonomy offered by electric motors, which need to be recharged, he said.
While there are no official figures, the ID.Buzz’s range has been estimated at about 400km by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club.
“In the most beautiful places, when you spend the night in the middle of nowhere, there won’t be charging points even in another 20 years,” said Roland Graebner, 52, who owns a quartet of old campers with which he has “crossed Europe,”
The fossil fuel-powered models “are just so flexible,” his partner Britta Kellermann, 53, said, even though she added that she finds the electric model “fascinating.”
“The adventures you can have will certainly be different” with the ID.Buzz, said Hans Toma, 62, a proud owner of a T2 camper from the late 1970s.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS