In 1976, towards the of the Ford Administration, hippies were no hip anymore. Sue Vargo and Molly Mead decided to travel across their destination in the Florida Keys in a Volkswagen bus. They were best buddies when they were in their 20s, living in a women’s only commune in Massachusetts with Acoustic guitars, muddy boots, and vegans with a mercurial streak. They purchased a beat-up V.W. bus from 1967, with white and red with a split-window as well as a stick shift that grew out of the ground like a strong sapling, a large and flat bus-driver’s steering wheel about half as big as a hula hoops and windshield wipers that wiggled between them, chirpy and excited like a puppy. They didn’t wipe any of the debris away. The bus didn’t have suspension. “You just bounced along,” Vargo stated bobbing her head. “Boing, boing, boing.”
The year is 2009, and Volkswagen has brought back its bus that is swollen up, tricked out, and now not as bouncy as the I.D. Buzz. “I.D.” stands for “intelligent design,” and “Buzz” means that it’s electrical. It’s possibly the most anticipated car in the history of automobiles. Volkswagen has been teasing a return of the classic, iconic, drive-it-to-the-Grateful-Dead bus for more than two decades. (I’m one of the folks who’s been keeping track of the days.) The company keeps telling us that it’s coming, but it’s never there. Then, finally, it’s arriving, and not just is it electrical, but it also comes with somewhat psychedelic and two-toned and based on the colors of a box of popsicles: tangerine grape, lime, lemon. It’s available in Europe this autumn and will be made available in the United States in 2024. (One reason behind the delay is the fact that Volkswagen is working on a larger version to be sold to customers in the U.S. market, with three rows of seats instead.) Volkswagen anticipates that the Buzz, with an estimated range of 265 miles, will be the king of a rapidly growing electric fleet. The C.E.O. at Volkswagen of America said that the demand for the Buzz in the U.S. is unlike anything that he has seen before. “The Buzz has the ability to rewrite the rules,” Top Gear published in April, and named it the Electric Car of the Year.
Bus nuts are breaking from their pop-tops. “I want one!” is pretty much the message on the internet. However, not all bus nuts are aboard. Sue Vargo is dubious. The Buzz of the time, as a result of the latest E.V.s is more swoosh-like than boing more of a machine that which you can operate – pulling levers to crank wheels, pumping brakes than a computer which you can ride around in as its screen flashes a variety of fictive reminders to you. It’s what the new cars can do, and what they do, and what. This is not what the old cars were doing or what they used to do. The bus was inexpensive, but the Buzz was expensive. (The basic U.S. version is expected to cost about forty-five million dollars.) Additionally, the front of the vehicle, infamously, was adorned with a face. one that was a wacky cheeky smile and the eyes had two perfectly round headlights with bug-eyed eyes, the nose was a swooping piece made of chrome, and the mouth with a curving bumper. The Buzz also has a face as well, but its eyes, which are hard and sharp, look irritated like they’re hidden under an emaciated brow. The smile on its face is an expression of a smile. “If this is the future,” one of the users posted on Facebook’s V.W. Bus Junkies Facebook page wrote, “I’d rather live in the past.”
The future of the car is undoubtedly high-speed swoosh, buzz, smart-smart this and this, smart. But do you think it’s appealing? V.W.’s appeal for the Buzz is a blend of nostalgia and the moral rigor of climate change, a seriousness which for V.W. is a utmost necessity. Volkswagen has dominated the industry of diesel vehicles through its “clean diesel” cars and trucks until 2015, when, it admitted to altering the software of more than 10 million vehicles to cheat in emissions tests. The scandal caused a rift in the company and resulted in an resignation from Martin Winterkorn, then the V.W. Group’s C.E.O. He is still facing legal charges Germany as well as an additional V.W. executive was sentenced to the death penalty in the American court. Civil lawsuits continue. This may, Volkswagen accepted to make close to two hundred and fifty million dollars in settlement of claims by England as well as Wales.
Sue Vargo and her wife had a Diesel VW Golf. “After the scandal, we brought it back to the dealer and traded it in for a new, gas Golf, for basically nothing,” she said to me. However, she does not trust V.W. Many people think that in the same way. The incident likely has accelerated Volkswagen’s plans to switch to electric. In the year 2000, the firm launched it’s Way to Zero initiative, striving to become Tesla and promising net carbon emissions to none by 2050 or at date of the latest. The pledge does not include only the vehicles it produces but also the process of making them: V.W. is investing in wind farms across Europe and has one of the largest solar power plants located in Germany. In 2030, half of Volkswagen’s U.S. sales are expected to be derived from E.V.s. The other carmakers are investing as much into the switch to electric. In fact, Elon Musk has admitted that even though Tesla is the leader in the E.V.-tech contest, Volkswagen places a very decent second.
The Volkswagen ID. Buzz, then, isn’t an ordinary electric car. It’s a campaign for Volkswagen’s sake. It’s also the vehicle that will usher in an E.V. revolution, which is truly a turning of the wheel in the car’s history.
The month of April was when I was able to watch my first Buzz in the New York International Auto Show in the Javits Center, a glass-and-steel K’nex-boxed building that is as full of appeal as an airfield. When I walked through the Javits Center on West Thirty-eighth Street, I amused myself with a four-story brick stable that housed thirty-six horses on the second level, an open carriage that was parked in front, and a sign in front that reads ” share the road: Horses paved the way.” In reality, when roads were paved, it was for bicycles.
