Now A Beetle Owner Has Something To Graduate To: 1973 Volkswagen 412 Road Test
Volkswagen might feel pretty confident now, but things seemed much scarier for the boys from Wolfsburg back in 1973; the company had milked just about every last drop from the air-cooled/rear-drive platform that had looked so futuristic when they ripped it off from Hans Ledwinka nearly four decades earlier and the verdict was still out on the new generation of water-cooled VWs. American car buyers could still buy the Type 4 in 1973, and so Car & Track felt compelled to review it.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I took a photo of a 411 while vacationing in Oregon. Thought it looked pretty cool: http://i.imgur.com/6scwy.jpg
"Body lean is hardly noticable." LOL!! Maybe if your BAC is .25 and you're talking on your cell phone. Watching this scared me, seriously.
A friend had an uncle who was a Volkswagen dealer in Green Bay who sold him one of these- actually a 1974 412 wagon, kind of a nice red color with a beige interior . As I recall the car was less than impressive. I was driving a 70 Squareback also red also a POS at the time so comparing the two was interesting.The friend at the time had a house in Morelos, Mexico and also owned an early 60s Ford piukup. At the time- maybe now too for all I know-Americans living in Mexico had to drive their U.S. registered vehicles back to the U.S. every months so the friend enlisted me to drive one of them back to Austin where the friend had a house.Well things went alright until the 412 broke down on the Reforma, the main street in Mexico City . A lot of would be mechanics started coming around under the impression that it was a Brasilia , a V.W. model produced in Mexico and Brazil which did look like a junior edition of the 412.We got the damn thing going- luckily this was maybe 1979 when Mexico City was a little smaller and drove it to Austin . It was slow, possibly even slower than my Squareback which unlike the 412 had a stick, but was like a Squareback but 1/4 bigger and handled even crappier somehow. But we took turns driving and I would say it was comfortable and I was able to stretch out and sleep with a bit more room than in my car.And the wierd front trunk was a bit bigger and shaped more like a Corvair's front trunk.