Street-Spotted: Rare VW Beetle 1300 from 1966
Seeing a VW Beetle down on the street won't surprise too many people these days. But seeing one in this nice of a condition is slightly less common.
As you've probably guessed from the lack of more modern bumpers and brick-sized side indicators on the fenders, this is not one of the later Beetles from the 1970s that overlapped with Rabbit and Dasher sales.
But we'll fast-forward to the part where a big, helpful badge on the engine cover tells us what geological time period we're looking at.
That big, helpful badge reads 1300, placing this example squarely in the year 1966. The actual displacement became 1285cc for that year, up from 1192cc, with horsepower count now going up to 50.
So this is one of those rare moments when the badge on the trunk was around for just one model year, while ambitiously rounding up the displacement a bit.
And by 1967 the displacement grew yet again to 1493cc, requiring a 1500 badge. The same year the Beetle actually got a few other "modern" bits including two-speed windshield wipers, a 12-volt electrical system, sealed beam headlights, and dual-circuit brakes. It was also the last year of the rounded bumper design, perhaps making it the most desirable Beetle model year.
In fact, these years saw a series of bumps in engine size in addition to gaining a strut-type front suspension after the rear suspension was revamped in 1969.
All of these little changes were still accompanied by innovative and self-deprecating ads by Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) that urged Americans to "Think small" as part of a campaign that began in 1959.
You might even remember the 1966 ad VW ran with the 7-foot-1 Wilt Chamberlain, whom they couldn't fit into a Beetle.
The now-legendary ad campaign succeeded in putting millions of Americans into what was already a dated machine for the time, in a car market used to dramatic styling changes from year to year.
The Beetle offered none of that, and looked like nothing else on the road—and not just because all the post-war cars were gone by the 1960s.
The Beetle did have the distinct advantage of seeing very limited direct competition from similarly sized cars. This only began to change in the 1960s as Japanese brands gained a foothold on the West Coast just as various European brands, including Simca and NSU, that had been sold in import dealerships were finally giving up and leaving.
By the mid 1960s the Beetle was already part of the American landscape, and VW's reach was not purely coastal. It also helped that the similarly dated Type 2 Bus was growing in popularity.
The VW Beetle is still a car we expect to see down on the street somewhere on the West Coast, but despite wearing black California plates we saw this particular 1966 Beetle on the East Coast.
And if somebody actually drove it here across the country instead of having it shipped, then... that's pretty impressive. But its overall condition looked too nice to have been subjected to such a jaunt, even though we cannot rule it out.
Will the Beetle eventually come back as an EV, or has the retro craze largely passed? Let us know what you think.
