As I believe I have made abundantly clear over these many years, I’m a man absolutely packed full of automotive fetishes of all manners and levels of depravity. One of the more mild yet persistent ones is a fondness for well-packed cargo areas of cars, trunks or frunks or luggage wells or, yes, vans.
I like thinking about these volumes of spaces into which one can cram things, and I especially like visualizing those volumes of spaces free from their surrounding structures. It’s a very niche and specific sort of thing to find compelling, but it does appear in the wild every now and then, and when it does, I’m delighted.
And, I’m delighted right now. That’s because I happened to encounter this Argentinian ad for the cargo version of the Volkswagen Type 2 transporter:
This ad hits all the key elements of my fetish: both well-packed cargo areas and a visualization of the cargo area itself. It’s only a two-dimensional representation – a full 3D structure would be even better, but I’m excited about it regardless. I like seeing the shape of the cargo area in a VW Type 2, which is largely a big unbroken rectangular prism, but does have to subtract the volume of space demanded by the drivetrain. It sort of ramps up at an angle there, clearing the transaxle and engine – which could be a Type 1 upright fan one or a flatter Type IV in this era, I’d think – and if the van had seats, the third row would be right in front of that little ramp.
Now, you may notice that I’ve redacted the labels of each of those filled areas of cargo; that’s because I thought it may be more fun if you get to guess! So, let’s see if you can identify what each of these cargo areas are crammed with:
Give it a guess! And just click the image to see the answers!
I guess if you made it this far, I can show you the original, un-redacted ad, too, if you can read Spanish, you’ll get the answers this way as well:
There is a bit of weirdness there; I don’t think I recognized those bottles of wine at first, and who puts “groceries” in boxes like that?
It’s such a good ad. And the last, unfilled space mentions my “everyday load” I can fill it with, which led me to imagine what the most glorious thing one could cram a VW cargo van full of; of course there’s really only one answer:
Chowder. Clam chowder, even, just fill that van to the brim full of hot, chunky, creamy clam chowder! Hear it slosh around as you drive, feel the weight shift, enjoy the warm, enveloping splash of chowder over your shoulders as you brake hard, knowing that for once in your life everything is perfect, as you haul around a van absolutely filled with clam chowder!
That’s the dream.
I thought the bottles of wine one was a mattress and I was wondering who would use a mattress shaped like that.
I thought it looked like a bunch of tightly packed Costco-sized Ferrero Rocher candy boxes. A weird mattress makes much more sense.
I’m impressed that they cut partial bottles, just so the could still densely pack the edges.
Did they make custom hemispherical bottles different sizes?
Civet coffee.
Vacuum Tubes.
Costumes for a production of “Hair”.
Cheese.
Mobile grow operation.
Bodies of desaparecidos?
(Sorry – dated reference there.) And yuck – the picture with the clam chowder really looks like a van that has learned to vomit.
Old copies of Autopian.
The paper issues were awesome, but I personally could have done without the David Tracy centerfold. Once in a while is fine but every month?
I was sure that those were boxes of pink packing peanuts.
I had to look that up, and now I want some. Damn you!
I was sure A was going to be rice. And B seemed more likely those large 40oz beers places on the roadside sell.
Drugs, drugs, clothes, drugs, drugs, graphic design.
Should’ve filled it with medialunas.
Should be filled with weed
The choice for the wine pictures is weird. We normally put them in 6-bottles boxes and just stack them vertically. I guess that the author of the ad belongs to the 0,000059% of the Argentine population that never bought wine in any quantity. We don’t mix with those people. We don’t even speak with them.
And then, nobody in the advertising agency gave half a fuck about the bottles picture. Most likely it was supervised by woman (the distribution of clothes and plants is perfect). Remember, this was the early ’80s. These days, any Argentine girl would gladly lecture you about wine and how to combine it. Back then, not so much.
The cash to pay for Dieselgate?
Hot ocean milk with dead animal croutons?
a savory latte with bugs in it.
I think my favourite thing about this site is that regardless of what silly reference I make, there’s always someone who gets it
The wine is my favorite, both because it is lazy (they cut off some of the bottles, and it is definitely just the wall of a large wine cellar), and because it amuses me to think that someone would pack a moving vehicle with wine in the same way they pack a wine cellar. For transport, the wine should probably be in those grocery boxes (or, ideally, wine boxes).
Fill it full of fan mail from some flounders..
…I mean, I have several ideas of things to put in the van:
Cram it full of Blown 500ci Hemi, for retro wheelstand joy.
Loot it from da ‘umiez n’ stuff it wiv plenny a’ boyz n’ dakka! Coz we Da Orkz!
Fill it with vibes, maaan. It’s a VW Bus, it’s made for peace, maaaan.
Fill it with all the money it takes to buy a T1 Westy these days.
I’m sure there’s plenty more goofy ideas I could come up with.
But isn’t Thursday Soylent Red day?
Please tell me you have a source for those massive oyster crackers 😮
This could be a clam chowder food truck, where the wonderful stuff is sold in an oyster cracker bowl (like soup in a bread bowl at the RenFest).
Preferably serving the clam chowder from some kind of vat or pot and not sloshing around the van as Jason horrifically illustrated.
No, that’s fine. Gotta have the cracker bowls, though.
Apropos of which, this is also such a great ad (from 1968 for magazines) for the baywindow bus:
https://www.atticpaper.com/prodimages/012321/vw_beans.jpg
As a very young and naive child I wondered how they managed to fill the bus so completely without opening any doors (since it didn’t look like the bus had a sunroof) since the beans would just spill out an open door so I thought maybe they cracked open the driver’s door window and poured the beans in through the crack. As I grew older and wised up to all the trickery used in advertising I was actually a little bummed to figure that they most likely just taped photos of beans to the inside surfaces of the windshield & windows (or used an X-Acto (R) knife to put photos of beans in a photo of the bus.) Much more fun to imagine the logistics and the actual reality of literally filling the bus full of beans…
Maybe that was the bus used to transport the baked beans for Ann Margret’s scene in Tommy!
I reckon if I filled one of these to the brim with Pokemon cards, I could drive it up to Rio Grande do Sul and fill out the most expensive customs form of all time.
Beef. Delicious Argentinian beef.
I heard that in Sam Elliott’s voice!
¡Eso es lo que hay para cenar!
You wanna buy a fur coat?
soooo many putas muertas (dead hookers)
Such a useful unit of measurement…
Was recently choosing between a Civic and an Accord, and the 6 dead hooker trunk capacity of the Accord was certainly a factor. Ultimately I decided 4 was sufficient for my needs, though.
Cocaine and Heroin
Marijuanna plants
By the time of the ad we produced almost no marihuana, and nothing of cocaine and heroin. Coke entered mainly from Bolivia via clandestine planes and boats, and marihuana from Paraguay stashed on any car, but mainly Ford F100s.
Now we produce almost everything (coke still comes from Colombia, Peru or Bolivia, but there are labs everywhere processing its byproducts).
Decades of peronism are not trouble-free.
I debated even making the joke, honlestly knowing little of Argentina. I prefer to think of a land of Gauchos and honest ranchers.
Ah, we still have those!
And malbec. We also have malbec.
My current favorite wine…
To the shock and surprise of all, I don’t know a great deal about Argentina. I know it’s about yaaaay big and sits south of Brazil with a few little countries sandwiched in between. They also have llamas, and if the llama kneels you could easily fit one and all of its llama gear into a VW van. So I’m going to say Argentinians bought those vans to haul their llamas to wherever they were needed.
We only have llamas in the very north, where few VW vans ever ventured.
Those were normally filled with 3 or 4 horses playing cards (truco), while another horse serves mate.
Normally a human being of some sort would do the driving, since horses were usually reluctant of getting a driving license.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. This comment is brilliant on its own, but I have learned more about Argentina in the past three minutes than in my life up to this point (although I could stand to read more about Juan Peron).
Thank you, Mr. AssMatt! I don’t have a newsletter thus far (at least not in English, but there’s this: https://elopadelacomarca.blogspot.com/).
Juan Peron was a handbook fascist, albeit a mild one given the times and the guys that inspired him: he just murdered a few thousand people. Also, he lived with a 14-y/o girl after he widowed. An Epstein before the Epstein.