For all of the likely societal problems the internet may have visited on the head of humanity, there is at least one thing that the internet had gifted unto humankind that is absolutely an unquestionable good: it is now far more likely for people just going about their days to see strange vintage pictures of unusual Volkswagen variants. You can be sitting in your underpants, elbow deep in a gin-filled bag of Funyuns, when out of the blue you encounter some picture of an old Volkswagen Type 2 with genuinely baffling modifications. This is the true worth of the internet.
And, of course, this actually did happen to me (well, not exactly; the gin-filled bag contained Munchos, not Funyuns) just today, when I happened to see an Instagram post containing a bunch of old, seemingly randomly selected images of classic VWs. While all were interesting to some degree, one really captured my attention more than the others, because of its specificity and peculiarity.
It’s the – holy crap – 15th picture here, so I hope you like clicking or swiping:
Now, I suspect this image comes from the 1950s – the bus itself seems to be a ’56, if I had to guess – and based on the sedately straightforward nature of the photography and subject, along with some of the equipment on the bus (an optional reverse lamp, added – and non-factory– reflectors) I suspect this was some sort of official image from some sort of agency, possibly municipal or governmental. The notable thing about the image, which I’ll show you again here, is the extra equipment installed on this bus, and that nifty little compartment door that was added:
Let’s look at the non-standard strangeness going on here. I think the biggest mystery is ① That big assembly of equipment hidden behind that nicely-done curved door ②. Then, we have an interesting double-pulley, similar to what VW had for air-conditioning-equipped air-cooled cars or the extra alternator used on mil-spec Type 181s, but predating both of those by at least a decade and a half or so.
That extra pulley is used to drive a belt that is spinning some other bit of equipment mounted on the side of the engine compartment, something that could be an extra generator or maybe some sort of compressor?
What was this for? The equipment installed at ① looks electrical in nature, and heavy-duty electrical at that. There’s three heavy-gauge wires (is this a three-phase AC something?) bolted between what look like cooling fins on maybe some sort of transformer? And what’s that box below it? What does all this stuff do?
I’m wondering if it’s some kind of auxiliary AC power system for something like one of these VW bus-based speed camera setups that were used in Europe between the late 1950s and into the 1970s. Like this one:
VW Bus converted into a stealth speed trap. Germany, 1970’s.
byu/5_Frog_Margin inTheWayWeWere
The amount of bodywork modification on those things is really remarkable! They cut the whole front apart!
Maybe it’s that, but on all the speed camera buses I’ve seen, I’ve never spotted a little corner access door like this one has. Since I’m stumped but still curious, I’m going to what I always do and punt it put to all of you, because you, the Autopian Hive Mind, are powerfully smart and I bet one of you will figure this out in, say, 15 minutes.
I hope so, at least, because I want to know what the hell is going on here. Is this a time machine? A full-bus-interior microwave? A nuclear reactor? What is it?
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