He was inspired to sketch the first van in 1947 after seeing a flatbed parts-hauler made from a Type I chassis while visiting the Volkswagen plant. The Microbus design was created by Ben Pon, a Dutch importer of VW Beetles. The first vehicle went into production March 8, 1950, at a Volkswagen plant in West Germany, and changed the way the world looked at cars. Regardless of its origins, the VW Microbus marks its 70th anniversary as both an icon and mode of transportation. “Before this, people used large cars, trucks and buses to haul people and cargo around.” Postwar, the company was looking to expand its product line by offering a vehicle that would shake up the automotive industry. Known as Type 2, the Microbus was an offshoot of the VW Beetle, called Type 1, which dates to 1933 when Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, proposed a “people’s car”-or Volkswagen-for the masses. That’s quite a transition for the vehicle, considering its roots. “It was a way of thumbing their noses at the establishment.”Ĭoncert-goers sit on the roof of a Volkswagen bus at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair at Bethel, N.Y., in mid-August 1969. “For many people, the VW Microbus became the symbol of protest with Detroit’s overpowered cars and society in general,” says Roger White, curator of road transportation history with the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. A certain segment of society decided to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” as Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary put it, by focusing on the psychedelic rock music performed by bands like the Grateful Dead and traveling around in Microbuses covered with depictions of peace signs and flowers.
In the 1960s, both Garcia and the Microbus came to represent a growing angst in America about the country’s role as a nuclear superpower and its reliance on commercialism to feed a voracious appetite for more, more, more.
It was an epochal moment when two counterculture symbols came together in tender recognition of their influence on mainstream society.
When Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, Volkswagen remembered the Grateful Dead frontman by running an ad featuring a VW Microbus with a tear streaming from one headlight.
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