You could argue that the seemingly-spared blue VW Bus in that viral Associated Press photo of the charred remains of Pacific Palisades doesn’t really matter. Tens of thousands of Angelinos lost their homes, billions of dollars of property were destroyed, and in that context, one VW Bus is just unimportant. And yet, as my conversation with an LA Times reporter went, perhaps for those not affected by the fires, the Bus became a symbol of hope. And that symbol has now been restored.
I think it’s human nature to try to find a great story in times of struggle; during horrible tragedies like natural disasters, news outlets often try to highlight stories of heroism. A small break from the doom and gloom of it all can be nice, and that’s what Azul, the blue VW bus captured by AP photographer Mark J. Terrill, became to so much of America, even if perhaps less so to those dealing with lost property or family members.
I understood this as I watched Volkswagen drive the newly-restored Azul out to applause in the basement of the Petersen Automotive Museum last night, and yet, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of emotion bubble up within me. Sometimes things become more than what they were intended to be; Azul — having been fortunately parked because its owner, Megan Weinraub, was still learning how to drive stick and didn’t want to park on a hill — was chosen by fate to be a symbol of American resilience.
It’s a bit silly; seeing the restored version of that symbol, in a way, felt to me like a representation of what we all hope will happen in the Palisades and in Altadena. The charred will become shiny again. The broken will be fixed so it’s even better than before. The ugliness will become beauty. The sadness will become the joy I saw in the face of Weinraub as she showed me around her freshly-redone Volkswagen:
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VW did a really nice job restoring this 1977 VW T2 Microbus, because as tempted as the in-house VW technicians were to bring it back to original condition, they decided to restore it back to where it was, only a bit nicer. The paint, for example, isn’t a factory color; VW found one that matched what Weinraub’s Bus looked like already. “We wanted to honor this…this is how the world got to know the car, and this is how we’re going to redo the car,” VW told me.
Ditto with the cool black-and-white Houndstooth interior upholstery. VW was able to keep the original upholstery up front, having cleaned it thoroughly, and they matched that fabric in the back, with a new bed to join the custom rear setup already there.
The engine was gone through by VW’s team, who cleaned it and gave it a compression check. The VW actually ran and drove when VW first rescued it, so there wasn’t extensive mechanical work needed. But CV boots were cracked, the front steering and suspension parts still need to be fixed (VW will handle that), the transmission shifter bushing is a bit loose, and on and on. But for the most part, the Bus was in remarkably good condition even after the fire.
[Editor’s Note: Based on what Weinraub said in the reel, it sounds like they also replaced an incorrect VW Beetle-type muffler with the proper muffler for the Type 4 engine installed in the bus! – JT]
Of course, one side was charred, with paint flaking, a window broken, and numerous melted plastic bits.
Here you can see some melted lights, a turn indicator lens and a side marker lamp:
“I have no idea why the car didn’t burn,” VW told me at the Petersen event. There were still 11 gallons of fuel in the tank, and with the broken window, ash and embers had clearly entered the cabin and landed on the wool seats. But luckily, Azul was spared.
It’s a nice story, and I’m glad to see VW is using it as an opportunity to nudge people towards donating to the California Fire Foundation. We here at The Autopian just sold our 2003 Pontiac Aztek so we could give the full sale proceeds to Watch Duty, an amazing fire-tracking app that has saved countless lives.
That’s perhaps Azul’s value in the grand scheme of it all. It can be more than just a tiny, insignificant hopeful story in the face of lost lives, destroyed communities, and billions of dollars of lost property. It can drive people to help.
I hope it does.
(top image parts: AP, VW)
Parts of my hometown burned back in 2000, and fast forward 12 years, i bought an AW11 MR2 that had been in one of those neighborhoods. It had a slightly warped rear bumper and tail lights because it got hot, but not TOO hot. Great to see Azul restored, although the actual fire recovery will take years.
That was truly touching! I’m glad Azul is back on the road.
“I have no idea why the car didn’t burn … and with the broken window, ash and embers had clearly entered the cabin and landed on the wool seats.”
Because wool is naturally fire-repellent.
Had the seats been vinyl it would have been up in smoke.
Once upon a time there was a VW Type 2, also in white over blue, that belonged to the people of Naval Air Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Passed down from one sailor or Marine to the next, each on a one or two-year tour, it was never more than a mile from a hot and salty ocean.
The front fascia had had a few chunks of the huge splay of rust knocked off with a bayonet, leaving giant teeth, soon matched by eyebrows spray painted above the headlights. The floor had rusted away behind the front seats all the way to the back seats: no one could sit in the middle.
It was used to carry sailboards down to the beach and residents from the wrong side of Guantanamo Bay (always incorrectly pronounced as “Lee-Ward”) over to the Naval Base side, where the manager of the hilltop McDonald’s effectively served as mayor of all he surveyed. In a cheaper era, the words “No Fat Chicks” had been painted across the left side with house paint and a roller. Every single person on the two sides of the Base thought to themselves “Yep, there goes The Death Bus.”
Until, in my custody after the exchange of $350 for The Death Bus plus a beach cruiser bicycle, it shuddered to a halt in the Post Exchange parking lot after a little shopping for Red Stripe beer. By that point motor oil remained inside the motor, after being poured in at the top, for no more than a long weekend, and it was a Tuesday. I caught the ex-school bus onto the ex-landing craft ferry and headed back across Guantanamo Bay to Leeward. What to do, what to do? I had pliers, some wire, a phillips head screw driver, and vague thoughts of getting a replacement motor shipped from Jamaica. Weeks went by.
Except that one morning Base Security had asked around enough and rang my phone number, asking if The Death Bus currently belonged to me. I was in trouble. “Yes,” I answered, “I’m trying to find a motor, I guess you want me to move it.”
“No,” said the Petty Officer. “We want to blow it up.”
There was a Navy jet squadron on Leeward that regularly practiced dropping bombs, and an artillery crew that regularly practiced shooting cannon shells, all to deter any local hordes from charging across the wire. They had run out of things in the Impact Area to drop bombs on and shoot cannon shells at.
It was also good practice for the Navy helicopter crews and Marine logisticians to practice hooking up things to lift from one place to another, since there were various mines that had been scattered around the base, and after 50 years no one was completely convinced as to where they were. Pushing The Death Bus across maybe mines seemed a bad idea.
The Death Bus served the good people of the United States for at least another 15 months, getting a little shorter every other Thursday. For a long time, from the right side of the C-9 channel flight to Norfolk, you could still see two blue doors, one painted “No,” hundreds of yards apart against scorches that looked just like the Pacific Palisades.
David Tracy, the mines are supposed to be mostly gone now. You’re on the clock.
I’ve never heard of this van, but there is an LA based VW van converted into a vehicle sized fire pit, called the Car-b-cue.
Even in the desert, it has resulted in panicked car fire reports.
The VW bus was one of the worst cars you could learn to drive stick on. The engine is way too weak for the car, and the rear suspension would turn into a pogo stick when you are learning to feather the clutch. The shifter is extremely vague. And the ratcheting handbrake takes some getting used to when you are starting out on a slope (although it does work fine once you’ve mastered it)
Maybe it’s good to start out with a terrible transmission. My first car, after getting my licence in an Austin Metro, was a secondhand MkII Fiesta. At first, I could not let the clutch in in 1st gear without stalling it, including getting it out of my uncle’s car lot up a steep slope, to the intense amusement of his mechanics. After a week, I could drive it smoothly anywhere.
It was a loaner until “my” car arrived, a new MkII Fiesta, the following weekend. As soon as I went to drive off, it was a revelation, easy-peasy. It turns out the loaner probably had a warped clutch, but after that I was confident to drive almost any manual car.
My driving instructor used a diesel Peugeot 306 for lessons, on the basis that it was was really difficult to stall. So the complete opposite idea to you.
I’d take a middle ground. Learn the basics on something easy, then immediately move to something difficult.
Or something like the old saying about what makes a good training aircraft: “easy to fly, but difficult to fly well“. ie you want something that is easy enough for a complete novice to pick up, but which also makes it obvious when you’ve not done something exactly right, so you can easily tell where you need to improve and learn.
I guess that’s actually the route I took. My very first lessons were in a Mk2 Escort, with its almost perfect 4-speed manual and easy clutch, followed by the Metro, a doddle to drive, then a baptism of fire in the warped Fiesta.
We used our ’71 bus to ferry people from the local primary school parking lot to a house up the steep and twisty hill in Belmont California. We strapped the slider open so we could make faster entry and exits for folks. Back then, driving a stick was just normal.
I’m tryin to teach my girlfriend to drive manual now and our main car is my Vanagon which I find hard to select the gears in. The rest of the car is good though. The handling is reasonable – the clutch and acceleration is fine for starting out.
After her first lesson at a deserted carpark she handed back the keys after stalling it and asked why would anyone have a manual.
I taught my daughter in my old GTI. I made the mistake early on by saying “you killed it”, meaning ‘stalled’. She thought she destroyed my car…
We had two of these vans in succession when I was a kid in the 80s. Before minivans / people carriers it was the only way to carry a family as large as ours. I remember my mum furiously trying to get into gear while the traffic behind her built up, and failing. It’s why she’s only driven automatic vehicles since the family got a Toyota Space Cruiser in 1990. And finding automatics in the UK in the 90s wasn’t always easy!
Truth! Saving grace, this one does seem to have a type 4 motor in it, standard after 74. They could actually sniff 3 digit horsepower numbers! I once got a sweet deal on a 1974 because the shifter was so worn out I was the only buyer that could actually get it in gear. They are horrible even after rebuilding.
Taught my wife to drive in my old 1392S Beetle back in the early 90’s, under the principle of drive that and she’d be fine in anything.
She had a 1955 Standard 8 with a crash box as a daily driver a couple years later, so it was good lesson 🙂
there was a devil in their head telling them to add flame decals
This is the perfect story for the Thanksgiving season. Well done!
Great story. They could have very easily gone overboard with the resto. I’m glad they didn’t. Fixed the paint and a few mechanical things and called it a day. That’s how it should be done.
Awesome story!
I, too felt a little uplifted when I read about this bus surviving. Yes, it was terrible that so many lost their lives and their homes, but seeing that iconic photo did instill a little hope in me.
I’m glad to see what VW did with little Azul. Thanks for the article, David!
DT – you should add a trigger warning about that gory melted lens pic before Torch sees it…
This is great but also what perplexes me about VW. They get things like this, the emotion of it, yet they can’t figure out how to make vehicles like this anymore. The Buzz is a sad expensive copy, they don’t make a Beetle.
Like you see people love these right? You can’t buy that kind of marketing yet they kick it aside. Look at the new Renault 5, that could have been the id.beetle. Bit of a tangent just perplexed by the disparity.
Let’s be fair. Fixing up a single old Type II is a stupid easy task when compared to building 100,000 good vehicles that people want to buy.
To be honest while the VW Bus has a following if you made the same vehicle now it would cost 10x as much and no one would buy it. Although I am a fan of a matching old car body on modern mechanical bits.
Nice bus. I had a ’79 camper, and it was always fun to sit above the front wheels like that, even though I know my knees were the crumple zone.
Couldn’t agree more; we had an ’85 weekender for a while and there is nothing like it. Still miss it sometimes, though we sold it to friends so I can still drive it when we go visit.
In my brain, I know this is marketing with an ulterior motive. But my heart loves this…I needed a dose of good humanity.
I like that the restoration was an Azul restoration, not a Bus restoration. Keeping the modified back interior, respecting the color, etc. I had a 74 beetle, which wasn’t a beetle, it was Howie. Specifically Howie. The way this vintage of VW, the individual cars have their individual personalities. Respecting that is a good move.
Howie is a cool name for a Beetle. What happened to him?
I was a teenager and had no clue how to take care of him. The steering went wonky, like 90 degrees of play, and a wicked shimmy at 50 MPH, and my parents decided it wasn’t safe. Sold away to somebody who was probably able to fix it better than me. Replaced with a Delta 88 at 18 years old.
I like those stories, because I have the same connection to my cars. I wish we had social media for cars, so we coid share this instead of hate and misinformation.
My first car was a special one, and I have a lot to say about him – he is still around, now the first car of my young cousin back on Brazil.