Junkyard Find: 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia
Published: September 19th, 2016
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The Volkswagen Vanagon has a global cult following, for reasons I have never understood, and the Westfalia camper version is an object of heavy-duty veneration among Vanagon zealots. You hear about the crazy prices that any Westfalia Vanagon will fetch … but it turns out that most serious Volkswagen fanatics are too cheap to pay the prices they quote so knowledgeably. So, rough examples of the Vanagon show up often at cheap self-service wrecking yards.Here’s an ’82 that I found last week in the Denver area.
This one doesn’t seem to be rusty, and it still has the genuine Westfalia stove and some of the furniture.
The engine is gone, probably into a Porsche 914. These vans had air-cooled engines until the 1983 model year, when they went to a troublesome wasserboxer setup.
This one has the rare factory air-conditioning option, which even the extremely irie Vanagon racers at GoWesty admit never worked very well.
Was it on Craigslist for $10,000, and then $5,000, and then $1,000, and then consigned to the junkyard after penny-pinching buyers offering Volkswagen-themed cannabis edibles instead of money drove the seller mad? Probably!
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Vanagon: It’s not a car. It’s a Volkswagen.
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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I'm surprised that has that many parts left on it. There are a few I could use on my '85, which we took on a family camping trip last weekend. Great times!
So what's the deal with "Junkyard Gems" over on that other site? I know that Murliee contributes to numerous websites, but it seems a shame that TTAC doesn't have a monopoly on this basic feature unless they absolutely don't have the bucks. Besides, I don't think the mouth breathing commenters over there fully appreciate this feature anyway.