Here’s Another Great Almost-Microbus: The Goliath Express

Have you heard of the concept of carcinization? It’s a type of convergent evolution where animals keep evolving into crabs. Or at least very crab-like animals. There’s just something about the crab-like body plan that just seems to work in a wide variety of environments, so much so that crab-like bodies have evolved in at least five separate times! It’s amazing. And you know what it reminds me of? Post-war Europe! And instead of crabs, the body plan that everything turns into are bread-loaf-shaped vans and commercial vehicles like the Volkswagen Type 2 Microbus.

The Microbus shape and basic design emerged in 1950 from VW, but a number of other buses with extremely similar shapes and market niches appeared on the market right around the same time; some were even a bit earlier, like the DKW Schnellaster from 1949, but most were just after the VW, like the Mercedes-Benz L 319 in 1956. Today I want to talk about the Goliath Express, because it is very Microbus-like.

Goliath was a German carmaker that was part of the Borgward group, and primarily focused on two-stroke passenger cars and three-wheeled utility vehicles. The Express came about in 1953, responding to the same sorts of postwar pressures for a commercial vehicle that spawned the birth of the Microbus. As you can see, the solution to that problem looked a hell of a lot like the one VW arrived at:

Same loaf-of-bread shape, same two-tone paint options for their passenger-carrying variations, same dual-rear-side-door entry, same optional sunroof and roof-mounted windows (see top image), same almost everything! Well, almost is doing a lot of work here, because these were quite different mechanically:

As you can see, unlike the rear-engined VW, the Goliath was a front-mid-engined design, and used a two-cylinder, two-stroke 900cc engine that made 40 horsepower; the VW flat four at the same time was making 36 hp from 1200cc, so the Goliath engine was impressive from a power-to-displacement standpoint. Plus, the packaging of the Express is pretty great, too: by packing the engine under the seat, the Express managed to have a flat load floor all the way to the rear, something the VW did not have. It’s a good packaging design, and seems to anticipate Japanese front-mid-engine vehicles like the Toyota Previa and so many Kei vans and trucks.

It’s also interesting how much marketing terminology was shared between the Express and the VW Type 2; in America, Volkswagen referred to the Microbus as a “station wagon” starting in the ’50s, to make it more palatable to families that couldn’t wrap their midcentury heads around daily-driving a “bus.” And here, in this 1957 Goliath brochure, we see the same thing, even if they added an extra “g” to “wagon,” calling it the “EXPRESS Station Waggon.”

The VW Bus was also called a “Kombi” in many markets, and look at this: so was the Goliath!

There were pickup truck versions of the Goliath, like the VW, though the Goliath ones had a simpler, wooden-slatted bed that lacked the VW’s under-bed storage lockers. The faces of the Express were as expressive and happy-seeming as a Microbus, though, with a big smiling grille and what look to be the same double-glass Hella headlamp units that the VW and DKW and Mercedes vans used!

Also, is there anything more comically Germanic than a little happy van with “GUMMIWERKE” written on the side?