Start Your Morning By Looking At Rounded-Back Rear-Engined Car Engine Lids

There’s a lot of things I don’t understand about myself, but I have grown to accept. My constant velleity for a hot dog, my deep respect for Gonzo the Great, my taillight obsession, the way I like to shove my hands into bins of things like dry beans or corn kernels or other similar small, uniform objects, and so on. On this list is my fascination with very specific automotive details, like engine lids on rear-engined cars.

Like any good near-fetish, it’s even more specific than you’d think. I’m talking about engine lids on rear-engined cars that tend to be of a sort of fastback shape – with usually a curved or sloped profile, not a traditional three-box-type (not that I have any issue with those, there’s some fantastic ones) but more of a two-curvy-box kind of thing.

You know, like the Volkswagen Beetle or Porsche 356 or Fiat 600, and so on. There’s many of these cars that have some wonderful engine lids with some wonderful vent arrangements, and I think it’d be a good idea to look at some of these now and appreciate them. How’s that sound? Too bad!

We may as well start with the best-known of these, the Volkswagen Beetle decklid. This is likely the rear engine lid most people are familiar with, and it’s also one that has gone through a lot of changes over the 65 years the Beetle was built. The one pictured above is from 1973 to the end of Beetle production (well, for German and Mexican Beetles, Brazil had something different) but if you’re curious, years ago I made a whole chart of Beetle decklids over the years:

It’s a nice shield-like decklid, and I think the four-vent-cluster version works well, perhaps better than the earlier two-vent-cluster variants.

Fiat had a lot of rear-engined cars back in the day, and they had some interesting decklids. The 500 is maybe the best-known, and features a pair of large rectangular air vent clusters, on either side of the opening latch. These decklids were unusual in that they were hinged at the bottom, and opened downwards instead of up.

The license plate lamp housing is interestingly ornate on these, I always thought.

There was an interesting Fiat 500 variant built by Steyr-Puch, and it featured a different engine, a flat-twin that could have a larger displacement, like this 650cc one. The vent pattern is quite different, with two small upper vent clusters and a set of four wide and thick horizontal vents at the middle of the lid. They also sprang for a lavish two license plate lamps!

The Fiat 126 – or, as in this case, the Polish variant, the 126p, had a sort of modernized take on the 500’s engine lid, more squared off and angular, with crisp folds and a wide, recessed area below the upper vent groups, which are divided into two sub groups consisting of a small cluster of four vertical vents, then a much wider cluster of vertical vents.

Of the rear-engined Fiats, my favorite is the 600’s engine lid (the Fiat 600 Multipla little van had a very similar decklid). There is extensive ventwork on this one, with two symmetrical and mirrored clusters of louvers, which have a straight but inward-angled outer edge and an inner edge that gracefully curves around the chromed license plate lamp housing.

The result is sort of like two wings of air vents, making these important cooling elements powerful graphic stylistic elements.

Somewhat similar to the Fiat 600 is the Renault 4CV’s engine lid, which also has most of its area covered with vents – well, more like louvers here, because of the flared shape of the bodywork just over the openings themselves, which aren’t just stamped openings.

The outer edge of the two louver groups follows the outer curve of the engine lid, and is straight at the center, again giving a sort of folded-wings look that adds a lot to the visual character of the car.

The little Subaru 360 was inspired by cars like the Beetle and Fiat 500, and has an engine lid in a similar general style. Here, there are two horizontal groups of vertical vents, one atop the other, separated by a thin dividing line and broken at the lower center by the small license plate lamp. The result is something that feels like a rectangular grille.

I especially like how some of these engine lids also incorporated a lone reverse lamp at a lower corner.

The Tatra T97 has one of the largest and most striking of these rear engine lids. It was one of the earliest, hailing from the mid 1930s, and the vents in this very curved engine lid serve more than just air intake purposes.

Being set in two vertical rectangular groups of horizontal vents, these louvers are positioned on either side of the Tatra’s large dorsal fin, and provide the means to see out of the back of the car as well as helping air escape the engine bay, where it is brought in by the two integrated side scoops.

The rear window glass is in the firewall just fore of the engine, so a driver looking backwards actually looks through two panes of glass (there’s another set of windows in front of the rear luggage compartment) then through these vents, finally sort of able to see what’s behind the car. Sort of.

Porsche is unique in this set of engine lids in that their air-intake vents are actually covered by a chrome grille, dressing up the more simple stamped vents of the other examples here. The 356 started with one mostly vertically-oriented chromed grille, and later grew to two side-by side grilles.

These do feel a bit more upmarket than just stamped louvers.

The Porsche 911 continues the 356’s use of a chrome or brushed stainless grille, but now we have a wide, effectively full-width horizontal grille, trapezoidal in shape with rounded corners.

Like the 356, this helps to make the air intake a genuine stylistic element of the car.

Man, we really just talked about engine lids and vents! Thanks for indulging me.