I have to admit, I thought the VW bus was already long gone. But, the news is still sad. Today, our beloved classic Volkswagen bus is coming to its end.
Volkswagen to end bus production in Brazil
The 63-year-old van, bus, hippie mobile and Deadhead wagon -- whatever you call it -- will finally become a classic.
By Clifford Atiyeh (Edited for length)
On Friday, the world will say goodbye to another classic car that should have gone belly-up decades earlier.
But the Volkswagen Type 2 bus, after more than 10 million made since 1950, is no ordinary old car. In the United States, the van became the symbol for the 1960s hippie counterculture, and like the Type 1 Beetle, a VW bus was slow, cheap to buy, cheaper to run and looked timeless. So timeless, in fact, that Volkswagen had kept the van in production -- nearly identical to how it looked and ran in 1967 -- until this Friday.
Brazil is the only country where you can buy a new VW bus (or Kombi, as it's known around the world), but the South American nation's upcoming safety regulations are forcing VW to cease Kombi production at its São Paulo plant.
The company's reputation for pushing popular old cars to their absolute last legs -- and wringing every last penny of profit out of them -- is unmatched in the industry. Volkswagen still sells an outdated sedan in China, the Santana Vista, that was discontinued in Germany in 1987. In 2009, Volkswagen finally stopped selling the first-generation Golf in South Africa, first introduced in 1974. And in 2003, Volkswagen's Mexican plant built the final Beetle, a nearly identical copy of the iconic car that first rolled down its Puebla assembly line in 1955.
Call them crazy, but Volkswagen knows a good thing isn't gone until it's practically run out of town.
For full article, see source link below.
Source: [msn.com]
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