Where are they now?

[Neil Davies]

For some unknown reason, I've not been allowed to go and work on my car this week. So instead, I've been watching old VW show videos (Bug Jam, Beetle Bash etc) from the late 80's and very early 90's that are on YouTube. As I've been watching, I've been checking the MoT and tax status of some of the interesting cars, and its scary how many of them didn't even see 1992, let alone 25 years after that!

But against the odds, it seems some have survived. One of my favourites was 80BMV, a '54 oval on Fuchs with a 1700 type 4 motor. What cars from that time did you like, and do they still exist?
[ Attachment: You are not allowed to view attachments ]

[nicolas]

i think it doesn't apply to british cars only. i think a lot of the 70's and 80's cars just 'vanished'.
one of the reasons may be that the cars were relatively speaking cheap to buy and the investment was what the owner wanted to do himself. kind of like buying a 1400 MK3 golf now and putting a nice set of rims on it and giving it a good paint job plus what snowballs from there. after a few years cars get sold off, some are kept that way, some are rebuild. i think it is now a shame not more of them are preserved.

[gkeeton@zbzoom.net]

You guys may not want to know. Being deeper involved in the car restoration end of the hobby with a job change, you see lots of things happen to cars. Barn finds that are saved, barn finds that are cut up. Stored cars the next generation rebuilds back to the exact way they were found in their glory days, or bodies installed on the frame of the To#¤ta pickup in the back yard to beat in the woods. The Aircooled VW will be enjoying a peak in the hobby for maybe another 5-10 years, then the generation that were once the heaviest involved in them will literally have started passing on. I have friends who's Dad's were involved in 30's/40's cars in the 70's/80's. Their cars are period Restorations/Hot Rods. There are a lot these days finding perfect low mile stock 30's/40's examples that no one gives a shit about anymore, and cutting them up creating modern Hot Rods with them. While one side of me is happy its not a Chinese soup can, imo there's just something cooler about a 30's/40's Ford with a modified flathead instead of a cookie cutter junkyard LS. I will NEVER have an Aircooled VW without an Aircooled VW engine in it. There's going to come a time in the not so distant future where there will be more Subaru powered Aircooled VW's (or even ELECTRIC powered Aircooled VWs) at the VW shows than with OG Aircooled engines.

[spoolin70]

What happened to Alan Smarts tube chassis car ?

I vaguely remember reading about it but never saw it in the metal.

Surely it wasn't cut up 

[Neil Davies]

Now that came back out for VW Action before it went to the Pod - 2004-ish?