About a year ago, I bought a bus.
My pastor looked at me like I was nuts. "Why a bus?" he said quizzically. He's a good joe, a smart man, an excellent father, and an engaging speaker. He doesn't get it.
My family doesn't get it. If you need a truck, buy a truck. Why an old hippie-wagen? Who wants to be seen in that?
My wife tolerates it. It doesn't threaten her station as my wife and lover. The bus does not compete for her affections nor does it threaten my willingness to go to a pressure-cooker job every day to support our family. But it does take me away from the living room in the evenings, and occasionally sends me to bed smelling like a refinery. There really isn't any 'charm' of the vehicle that tugs at her. That's because she see a car as an appliance: Who gets lathered up over the beauty of a refrigerator? Especially an OLD refrigerator?
This is not about any of these people, who are all wonderful people, whether they 'get it' or not.
This is about a universe of mis-assumptions, both positive and negative, about owning an iconic vehicle and the remarkable amounts of prejudice that owners of iconic vehicles put up with, both from other potential owners, and from those who don't 'get it.' If you don't understand why someone would want a vintage vehicle, some answers are below. If you are someone who says, "Oh, I wish I had one!" read this. (The list addresses all vintage vehicles, and VW's specifically. All are applicable to anyone with an itch to own a 'cool old car.')
Here's a Letterman list of assumptions that must be beaten out of the 'vintage vehicle enthusiast':
1. Get A Clue: The ‘60s are over. So are the ‘50s, ‘70s, ‘80s (thank God), ‘90s, in fact the entire 20th century. Any vintage parts, procedures, prices, or promises from those decades are historical artifacts today and need to be constantly reviewed and revised as vintage vehicles age and the supply of crucial parts dwindle to a halt.
2. A Repair Manual for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir is a HISTORY book: If you want to understand the state of the art at the time your vintage car was built, its a great book. Muir was a beautiful person and his love of vintage vehicles was unsurpassed. But he wasn't Jesus, and his book has not aged well because (surprise!) many of the techniques and materials he discusses and made use of were forty years out of date when he first wrote the book. His book was chiefly to encourage the average owner of the late 1960s that the they were capable of taking care of their own car, and didn't need too be rooked by the dealership to 'Keep their Ride Alive.' In that last sense, his book is a good read because it is inspirational, not because it is accurate.
3. VW Buses Aren’t For Hippies (and never were): I used to take offense to the Bus / Hippie association when I first bought a bus in 1992. I assumed the ragging was just from John-Bircher toad-stools who still needed to bash a hippie now and then to prove their bona fides. Personally, I fell in love with Volkswagens as a breed because their design was implicitly 'owner-operator-mechanic' and that anyone who had the sense to screw in a lightbulb could keep one of these cars on the road. They were eminently practical and that fueled interest from tradesmen, families, and even the iconoclastic anti-authoritarian (some of which some were 'hippies.') In the 21st Century, nobody remembers that by 1973, every third family in the USA owned a Volkswagen, or that VW weren't hippie cars, they were 'everyone's car.' A parking lot full of VW Buses or Beetles wasn't an Earth Day rally, it was just the parking lot of your supermarket. In all of the research I've been able to do, a VW Bus is associated with the hippie culture based on one anonymous picture from Woodstock. Who says stereotypes aren't alive and well? But that's what stuck. The irony is that a sluggard's ethic is wholly unsuited to vehicles that require more maintenance, not less, than other vehicles of its time. (The maintenance is not hard, but CANNOT be neglected.)
1. Get A Clue: The ‘60s are over. So are the ‘50s, ‘70s, ‘80s (thank God), ‘90s, in fact the entire 20th century. Any vintage parts, procedures, prices, or promises from those decades are historical artifacts today and need to be constantly reviewed and revised as vintage vehicles age and the supply of crucial parts dwindle to a halt.
2. A Repair Manual for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir is a HISTORY book: If you want to understand the state of the art at the time your vintage car was built, its a great book. Muir was a beautiful person and his love of vintage vehicles was unsurpassed. But he wasn't Jesus, and his book has not aged well because (surprise!) many of the techniques and materials he discusses and made use of were forty years out of date when he first wrote the book. His book was chiefly to encourage the average owner of the late 1960s that the they were capable of taking care of their own car, and didn't need too be rooked by the dealership to 'Keep their Ride Alive.' In that last sense, his book is a good read because it is inspirational, not because it is accurate.
3. VW Buses Aren’t For Hippies (and never were): I used to take offense to the Bus / Hippie association when I first bought a bus in 1992. I assumed the ragging was just from John-Bircher toad-stools who still needed to bash a hippie now and then to prove their bona fides. Personally, I fell in love with Volkswagens as a breed because their design was implicitly 'owner-operator-mechanic' and that anyone who had the sense to screw in a lightbulb could keep one of these cars on the road. They were eminently practical and that fueled interest from tradesmen, families, and even the iconoclastic anti-authoritarian (some of which some were 'hippies.') In the 21st Century, nobody remembers that by 1973, every third family in the USA owned a Volkswagen, or that VW weren't hippie cars, they were 'everyone's car.' A parking lot full of VW Buses or Beetles wasn't an Earth Day rally, it was just the parking lot of your supermarket. In all of the research I've been able to do, a VW Bus is associated with the hippie culture based on one anonymous picture from Woodstock. Who says stereotypes aren't alive and well? But that's what stuck. The irony is that a sluggard's ethic is wholly unsuited to vehicles that require more maintenance, not less, than other vehicles of its time. (The maintenance is not hard, but CANNOT be neglected.)
What this means today is that VW Buses are especially ill-suited for 16-20 year old scrofulous lot wookies who "Wanna Phollow Phish like all the O.G. DedHeadz usedta roll back in da Day.”
???
(Where did all this “gangsta-rasta-hippie” nonsense come from, anyway? Again, I digress, and again, see Reality #1, especially if you fit the above description. If you don't own shop clothes or have a fairly stiff work ethic, don't buy a vintage car. ANY vintage car.)
4. Parts will never be cheaper than they are NOW: 35 years after the last Bus left Hanover, there is not going to be a miraculous resurgence of aftermarket parts. The fleet shrinks, the market contracts, less demand, less supply. Get over it. No one made a cent doing 'one off' parts runs. If you think parts quality is bad now...Stay tuned.
5. If you want ANY vintage vehicle, you'd better be buying it with three things in mind:
???
(Where did all this “gangsta-rasta-hippie” nonsense come from, anyway? Again, I digress, and again, see Reality #1, especially if you fit the above description. If you don't own shop clothes or have a fairly stiff work ethic, don't buy a vintage car. ANY vintage car.)
4. Parts will never be cheaper than they are NOW: 35 years after the last Bus left Hanover, there is not going to be a miraculous resurgence of aftermarket parts. The fleet shrinks, the market contracts, less demand, less supply. Get over it. No one made a cent doing 'one off' parts runs. If you think parts quality is bad now...Stay tuned.
5. If you want ANY vintage vehicle, you'd better be buying it with three things in mind:
a) Insurance. No one is going to insure it for as much as you think it is worth. If it is that valuable, you probably shouldn't be commuting to work in it unless your are extremely reckless or obscenely wealthy.
b) Maintenance and Repair. You're it, buddy. You may think you can take it to a shop and they will know what to do. They won't. You do not have a vehicle that is in their book. Your car is 'special needs' and they don't do that kind of work. (Or worse, they will work on it without knowing what they're doing, and use your car to practice on.) You had better be able to do all, or almost all of your own work yourself. Or don't get into the hobby in the first place. This doesn't mean you MUST know how to do it all before you start. It just means you'd better be willing and unafraid to LEARN.
c) No matter how new your old car is, you will always be safer in a modern car. That's because, at least here in the states, there is nothing besides Horse Power that is more important than safety. (This also carries with it a bucket load of emissions issues that are beyond the scope of this blog.) Most vintage vehicles didn't even come with seat belts for heaven's sake! So if mummy and daddy say no to the cute little MGB you've always wanted, its because they don't want to have to identify you from dental records when a GMC Yukon Denali gets you stuck in its tire tread. (Fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop....)
d) If you are buying any vintage vehicle to improve your image, to look cool, or show what a wild-and-crazy party in your pants you are, spend the money somewhere else. Like Therapy.
6. A vintage vehicle is like a Rick James 'Superfreak'; a narcissistic home-wrecking tramp that is high maintenance, with expensive tastes, celebrated for tantrum throwing, impossible to please and will make you look like a jackass in front of your friends, rather than like the super-hipster you were hoping for. Be willing to embrace the Shrew if you really want to drive something out of the ordinary. That's because ordinary people won't put up with this kind of drama out of their C-A-R. (This is because ordinary people think of their car the same way they think of a washing machine, e.g. as an appliance.)
7. No matter how much money you spent to buy it, the cost of upkeep will far exceed the cost of purchase.
8. This is an expensive hobby, yet it is often populated by dabblers and corner-cutters, convinced that there is a cheap way to do everything that is 'just as good' either by themselves or with inferior materials. Sometimes there is. When the vintage vehicle community finds the 'better ways' they share them. Still, cheaper parts usually equal 'inferior parts.' Cheaper labor usually means they substitute a bigger hammer for the deft touch of the right tool. This is reality.
9. Mis-information is rife. If you take the advice of every dope on an internet forum, you'll be left chasing your tail, ruining parts, tools, or the vehicle itself. Just like every source of information, its often wise to test it first before you put everything on the line to use it on your irreplaceable whatsit. In most internet forums, there are usually old hands who have offered advice that has worked because they actually have the experience to back it, and are generous enough to share it. Those are the people worth knowing.
10. Because of the high population of cheap dreamers, restoration of a vintage vehicle is rife with con artists, scams, ripoffs, and outright theft. Automotive Body repair is by far the most frequently sued small business in the United States, not because they all do lousy work, but because the work is so expensive (it is VERY labor intensive) that you can't tell if you've gotten a really good deal on a paint job, or one of the employees is about to skip town with your down payment. Or something in-between. I've paid for four paint jobs in my life, and been dis-satisfied with all but one of them. (No it wasn't the most expensive one. That boob left HAIR in the clear-coat and was out of business a week after I collected my car.) A cheap dreamer is a sucker. Don't be the sucker.
Does this put you off owning a vintage car? Good. Does this explain why some people love it? Let me switch polarities for a moment and give you a reverse list:
1. Prior to the introduction of digital engine management systems (which have a million sensors, mostly to keep your car from too many emissions) even Fuel Injected Vehicles could be diagnosed by the owner with a $15 multi-meter and a test lamp. An earlier engine mixed the fuel and air for burning in a miniature toilet bowl called a carburetor. This was adjusted with a screwdriver, often by ear. This is as different an experience to working on a modern car, as a Model T Ford was to someone working on a *horse.* We'll see this theme come around again and again. It was a more visceral experience, with no factory stops or safety nets to keep you from doing something really damaging.
2. Most vintage car enthusiasts are not trying to drag their vehicle into the 21st Century by adding components that weren't there originally. (The poor VW Beetle seems to be the hacked upon exception.) They're in it for the experience of driving a vehicle that was built in a different era with different performance assumptions, whether that is open body racers or luxury vehicles.
3. There is a second class of enthusiast: The Historian, or show car nut. Whether working a car in stock form or customized, they are chiefly about the artistry of the vehicle, either as expressions of individualism (custom vehicles) or as restoration work that allows what they believe is the most beautiful attributes of the original vehicle to come out. (If you don't believe in vehicle beauty, look at a Pontiac Aztek, a Ford Edsel and then a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette StingRay. The design can be breath-takingly bad...or beautiful.)
The hang up for this type of vintage vehicle nut is that their work of art is a .... work of art. Not to drive. Just polish it with a diaper. On the show circuit, these are called 'Trailer Queens.' This is like owning a Gutenberg Bible and never taking it out of the display case to, perhaps, read it.
4. To experience this kind of 'alternate automotive lifestyle,' owners will either spend fantastic amounts of money having others perform much of the work, or spend fantastic amounts of their own time and money making an objet d'art that they want to use. This is the same level of self-satisfaction that an Audiophile gets out of building his own speakers, or a model airplane nut gets out of flying a plane that he built himself from a box of balsa wood.
5. If you've ever ridden a bicycle extensively, you know that, at some level, the contraption begins to feel like an extension of your body. You animise it, giving it attributes of self awareness and personality. When a component begins to act differently than it did before, it draws instant notice because you experience the feedback very directly with your proprioceptive nervous system because your muscles and joints are directly coupled to the steering, braking, drive, suspension, etc.
This is one of the appeals of many vintage cars: 'direct drive.' The mechanisms of manipulating steering, braking, drive and suspension are more like a bicycle than a modern car. You are much less insulated from the road, and from a visceral awareness of what your vehicle is doing. I think this explains the long appeal of stick shift rather than automatic for many vintage cars: you're much more involved in the driving process.
6. I'm going to keep 'riding the bicycle' analogy: If you want to putter down the beach, a Beach Cruiser bike is your choice. If you want to fly through the air and try not to land on your face, a BMX bike is your ride. If you wish to ride across the country, the previous two bike designs would kill the rider, but a Touring bike would be just the ticket.
Today we have many different types of crossover vehicles, yet they all have many similarities: the cupholders, the power-everything, the airbags. Vintage vehicles represent a different developmental period for cars where designs were much less standardized than today. The degree of specialization today is drab compared to cars earlier in their evolution. Today, manufacturers chase MPG, Hybrid, Safety Stars, and lowest wind resistance. (Ever wonder why all of the cars are starting to look the same? That's why: physics dictates a certain look to acquire a lower wind resistance.)
The uniqueness of earlier vehicles, and the branching of their technological evolution is endlessly fascinating.
7. 'Car guys' despite how they've been sold in the media as a single thought block, are a odd lot. They aren't all interested in horsepower, and they aren't all ill-mannered oafs working on hunks of rust on cinder blocks in their drive-way. The personality type, education level, and income all vary WILDLY. Some enthusiasts are drivers. Some are builders. Some are researchers. All of them are willing to do the other things that they are NOT to be able to do the thing that they really want to do. How's that for a mixed bag?
Does this put you off owning a vintage car? Good. Does this explain why some people love it? Let me switch polarities for a moment and give you a reverse list:
1. Prior to the introduction of digital engine management systems (which have a million sensors, mostly to keep your car from too many emissions) even Fuel Injected Vehicles could be diagnosed by the owner with a $15 multi-meter and a test lamp. An earlier engine mixed the fuel and air for burning in a miniature toilet bowl called a carburetor. This was adjusted with a screwdriver, often by ear. This is as different an experience to working on a modern car, as a Model T Ford was to someone working on a *horse.* We'll see this theme come around again and again. It was a more visceral experience, with no factory stops or safety nets to keep you from doing something really damaging.
2. Most vintage car enthusiasts are not trying to drag their vehicle into the 21st Century by adding components that weren't there originally. (The poor VW Beetle seems to be the hacked upon exception.) They're in it for the experience of driving a vehicle that was built in a different era with different performance assumptions, whether that is open body racers or luxury vehicles.
3. There is a second class of enthusiast: The Historian, or show car nut. Whether working a car in stock form or customized, they are chiefly about the artistry of the vehicle, either as expressions of individualism (custom vehicles) or as restoration work that allows what they believe is the most beautiful attributes of the original vehicle to come out. (If you don't believe in vehicle beauty, look at a Pontiac Aztek, a Ford Edsel and then a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette StingRay. The design can be breath-takingly bad...or beautiful.)
The hang up for this type of vintage vehicle nut is that their work of art is a .... work of art. Not to drive. Just polish it with a diaper. On the show circuit, these are called 'Trailer Queens.' This is like owning a Gutenberg Bible and never taking it out of the display case to, perhaps, read it.
4. To experience this kind of 'alternate automotive lifestyle,' owners will either spend fantastic amounts of money having others perform much of the work, or spend fantastic amounts of their own time and money making an objet d'art that they want to use. This is the same level of self-satisfaction that an Audiophile gets out of building his own speakers, or a model airplane nut gets out of flying a plane that he built himself from a box of balsa wood.
5. If you've ever ridden a bicycle extensively, you know that, at some level, the contraption begins to feel like an extension of your body. You animise it, giving it attributes of self awareness and personality. When a component begins to act differently than it did before, it draws instant notice because you experience the feedback very directly with your proprioceptive nervous system because your muscles and joints are directly coupled to the steering, braking, drive, suspension, etc.
This is one of the appeals of many vintage cars: 'direct drive.' The mechanisms of manipulating steering, braking, drive and suspension are more like a bicycle than a modern car. You are much less insulated from the road, and from a visceral awareness of what your vehicle is doing. I think this explains the long appeal of stick shift rather than automatic for many vintage cars: you're much more involved in the driving process.
6. I'm going to keep 'riding the bicycle' analogy: If you want to putter down the beach, a Beach Cruiser bike is your choice. If you want to fly through the air and try not to land on your face, a BMX bike is your ride. If you wish to ride across the country, the previous two bike designs would kill the rider, but a Touring bike would be just the ticket.
Today we have many different types of crossover vehicles, yet they all have many similarities: the cupholders, the power-everything, the airbags. Vintage vehicles represent a different developmental period for cars where designs were much less standardized than today. The degree of specialization today is drab compared to cars earlier in their evolution. Today, manufacturers chase MPG, Hybrid, Safety Stars, and lowest wind resistance. (Ever wonder why all of the cars are starting to look the same? That's why: physics dictates a certain look to acquire a lower wind resistance.)
The uniqueness of earlier vehicles, and the branching of their technological evolution is endlessly fascinating.
7. 'Car guys' despite how they've been sold in the media as a single thought block, are a odd lot. They aren't all interested in horsepower, and they aren't all ill-mannered oafs working on hunks of rust on cinder blocks in their drive-way. The personality type, education level, and income all vary WILDLY. Some enthusiasts are drivers. Some are builders. Some are researchers. All of them are willing to do the other things that they are NOT to be able to do the thing that they really want to do. How's that for a mixed bag?
