The origins of the Type 2 are credited to Ben Pon, the Dutch VW importer, who in 1946 had visited the Wolfsburg factory with a view to importing Beetles (or KDF Wagens as they were then) to the Netherlands. However on his trip he saw something that interested him more.
What he had seen was a homemade parts mover based on a Beetle chassis, but with the driver and controls sat atop the engine, with a large flat load bed in front of them, this little vehicle was called the Plattenwagen. Pon made a quick sketch and returned to Holland. Ben Pon returned to Wolfsburg in 1947 with some more detailed sketches of his new concept, and a few criteria it had to meet. Namely; it had to be able to carry a load of 1500kg, and that the driver and controls should be mounted at the front of the vehicle.
Development began on the project in 1948, and 3 short months later the first prototype had been made. After initial testing it became apparent that the modified T1 chassis wasn’t going to be sufficient for the job, so a ladder chassis with a separate body was employed.
Upon looking at a split screen bus you’d be hard pushed to believe any consideration had been give to aerodynamics during its conception, however the initial prototypes had achieved very poor drag coefficients, around 0.75. The wind tunnel at the technical University in Braunschweig had been used to refine the shape, and the Cd was reduced to around 0.48 by the introduction of a V-shape to the nose and windscreen area. Heinz Nordhoff approved the new vehicle for production in 1949, and the first production model left the production line in November of 1949. A total of 8 vehicles were made in 1949, with the split being; 6 panels, 1 Kombi and 1 Microbus. By the end of 1950 production was over 8000 units, rising to nearly 50,000 for the last year of Barndoor production.
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