Junkyard Find: 1974 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Coupe
The air-cooled Volkswagen was so rust-prone that it managed to get serious cancer in the normally rust-free San Francisco Bay Area, but quite a few have managed to hang on to life in that region. This last-year-of-production Karmann Ghia coupe showed up at the same Oakland wrecking yard that gave us the beachfront rust victim ’84 Toyota MasterAce and the gory Integra Halloween display last week. Its rust isn’t quite in the same league as the van’s, but then it probably lived further from the ocean.
It rains a lot during Northern California winters (in fact, it only rains during the winter there), so bad weatherstripping leads to this sort of thing around Volkswagen windows.
Here’s a San Francisco residential parking ticket from 1983, when the car was just 9 years old.
The engine is still intact, and will probably add some crunchiness for The Crusher‘s enjoyment.
You see, nobody wants an EGR-equipped VW Type 1 smog motor, for good reason.
Here’s something you often see on these cars: rust where the paint burned off during a minor engine fire. Looks like concentric rust circles, probably from multiple engine fires. That’s life with an air-cooled VW!
Still plenty of interior bits left.
The clock/gas gauge/idiot-light panel looked pretty good, so I bought it. Normally, I wouldn’t buy a car clock for my collection without testing it first, but Bosch quartz clocks usually function just fine. When I got it home and hooked it up to 12 volts, it worked perfectly. Score!
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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So many factual errors here I'm amazed . VW's like all older German Vehicles , were high maintenance but if you kept after then they never , _EVER_ caught fire . The base pre smog timing was 10° static BTDC and afforded good power @ 53 HP because the cars were light (and therefore deadly in crashes) along with an honest 35 MPG even when run flat out all the time . The EGR was dead simple to disable or , if you cared about emissions , change the hose routing to it only opened under power and thereby didn't affect driveability one bit . The slush box tranny fitted to the TYP III , IV and millions upon millions of Audis and nearly ALL Japanese cars in that era , was the world beating Borg Warner model 35 built under license and almost unkillable as long as you changed the fluid & filter every 40,000 miles and resisted playing with it . Ditto the bloody crude Bosh D-jetronic F.I. ~ change the fuel filter and hoses every 12 months and it never ever failed , started up easily in sub zero or 125° temps and gave better power & fuel economy than the carbys did or could. Sadly , owners & ' enthusiasts ' (idiots) always had to touch things that were fine , this invariably led to problems . VW only added it to the 1968 > TYP III to make it pass emissions . The L-Jetronic F.I. was air flow controlled and so was easily adjusted to increase power and it didn't care how big a cam was in it either . 'Khias were terribly vented heat and fresh air wise , I had several and hated them all for this reason alone . -Nate
Now that you mention it , I don't recall any of the people I knew who had air-cooled VWs equipped with the Automatic Stickshift ( a GF had one so equipped and so did a guy I knew ) or another friend's 1971 automatic Fastback or the friend's 1974 412 auto who actually had the transmission fail . Meanwhile the 4-speed on my Squareback did go out , recall buying a replacement at a junkyard in the late seventies for maybe fifty dollars . The guy who had the automatic bug switched it to a 4-speed but this may have been because back in the seventies an automatic was considered uncool or maybe unmanly . Drove the GF's automatic equipped 1971 Bug and actually didn't find it especially slow but back in the day there were complaints of that .I did find the buddy's automatic Fastback and the other buddy's 412 feeling quite sluggish with the automatic .He was a drive -it - til -it drops dead type and was bad about maintenance which may be why his caught fire .