Someone Help Me Understand VW’s Four-Door Choices In The Air-Cooled Era

Volkswagen, at least air-cooled-era Volkswagen, has a very strange relationship with four-door cars, and it’s not a relationship I understand. For most of the air-cooled era, VW was pretty staunchly two-door focused, something that I generally associated with German car market preferences, though I don’t pretend to fully understand those, either.

My personal daily-driver cars have generally been mostly two-door cars, at least in part because a good number of those have been Beetles, but even looking at the my non-Beetle daily drivers – a Nissan Pao, Volvo 1800S, a Reliant Scimitar, a Yugo, an Isuzu Pickup, and so on – they’ve all been two-door cars. Until the 2CV finally made it back into the world of the running, I’d never realized the joys of four doors, and while I don’t think I need the extra pair of doors, I get the appeal. But I’m not sure VW ever really did.

Which is kind of strange, since the first car that Volkswagen technically built in real numbers was a four-door car: the wartime Kübelwagen:

But then, after that, VW went decades without a four-door passenger car – I mean, if we don’t count the Microbus, which is sort of a different category because it’s a van, even though VW sold it as a “Station Wagon” and, let’s be honest here, that likely filled most of VW’s four-door-like requirements, even if those had sliding doors.

Okay, but back to non-van passenger car four-door Volkswagens: it took VW until 1968 to actually build and sell four-door cars, and the ones the came out with were a bit, um, unexpected. First, there was the Type 181, which we know here as the Thing, which was a sort of modernized Kübelwagen, a military/utility/fun car:

Not only did it come with four doors, you could turn it into a no-door car, as you see above. But the cutouts there should show you where the doors go, you’re pretty smart. The other four-door VW introduced in 1968 was the Type 4 Sedan:

I always thought the Type 4s were really interesting cars, despite them being somewhat of a failure for VW, sales-wise. They were a real attempt to modernize the technological DNA of the company that started way back in 1938 – air-cooled, rear-mounted, horizontally-opposed engines and torsion bar suspension and so on – by making cars with modern unibodies, updated front suspension, and such advancements as electronic fuel injection and so on. The VW Type 3s started some of this, but it was the Type 4 that really attempted to drag the VW concepts into the modern world. Now that I think about it, the Type 3 wagon, the Squareback, was only two-door as well, but none of the Type 3s had four doors like the Type 4 family did.

There were three cars in the Type 4 family: a two-door fastback, a two-door wagon, and a four-door sedan. Now, here’s what I don’t get at all: why wasn’t the wagon given four doors?

You’d think out of all of the cars in this lineup, the wagon should have been the one with four doors. It was absolutely pitched as a family car, and that’s when you want four doors, right? Because you always have people, either in their larval kid state or grown, getting in the back seat!

I don’t get it at all. Ads of the era, as you can see above, definitely showed the wagons being used as family cars, but that mom would have to wrangle those squirmy kids into the back through the front door, and if anyone has to pee in the back seat, a minimum of two people are getting out of that car.

Now, sure, the four-door sedan could be a viable family car, and I’m sure was for plenty of people. VW’s clever packaging and flat engine design meant there was great storage room front and rear, even in non-wagon form:

Here’s a nice cutaway, too, showing how roomy these things were – remember, all that area up front is a trunk, too:

…but even so, a wagon would have been even better, in many cases. And it’s not like the design of the wagon couldn’t have had that rear door. I mean, look:

There’s plenty of room back there for a back-row door. Compare it to the sedan:

There’s even a body panel seam right where a door edge could be! Why wasn’t this section a door? Look, a door would have fit there just fine:

I really don’t understand what VW was thinking here at all. I’m pretty sure the rear door from the sedan could have been made to work here, too. They were developing these bodies at the same time, and no one thought to make the sedan and wagon the same up to the C-pillar, and have a four-door wagon? They must have considered it, right? But why did they abandon it?

It’s not like the Type 4 wagon had, say, sporting pretensions and was trying to be a shooting brake, or something. Sure, VW was happy it had more power than previous models, but this was pitched as a family wagon. Maybe it was a safety thing in an era before common child locks? Keep the kids trapped back there?

And, it’s not like VW didn’t know how to build four door wagons; the VW Brasilia (or Igala, for the Nigerian-built versions) was based on the smaller and less sophisticated Beetle Type 1 platform, and yet they still managed to have a four-door wagon version of that car:

All of this is to say that I’m baffled by VW’s late ’60s to mid-’70s thinking. Could a four-door Type 4 wagon have maybe saved that doomed class of air-cooled VW? Maybe? Probably not, as the liquid cooled FWD cars were definitely coming no matter what, but who knows?

If anyone has any theories to explain this weird fixation on two-door wagons, I’d love to hear it.