There’s A VW Thing At This Tiguan Event So Let’s Talk About The Air Box Mystery

I’m here in lovely Bozeman, Montana for Volkswagen’s new Tiguan event, and, sure, the new Tig looks nice, but I’m more taken by another car VW brought to the party: a 1973 VW Type 181, which most of us in America know as the VW Thing. VW brought it here because, as they told me, the Thing was VW’s first sport-utility vehicle, and I suppose that could be true, even though I think a better analogue to the Tiguan would be the short-lived 1990-1991 Golf Country.

The Thing (called the Safari or Trekker or Kurierwagen in other markets) started life in 1968 as a stopgap vehicle for the German army, which needed a replacement for the DKW Munga before the “Europa Jeep” would be ready – which never really materialized. To make this ersatz jeep-like vehicle, VW looked back to their wartime past, when they built Kübelwagens on VW Type 1 (Beetle, then known as the Kdf-Wagen) chassis.

They did the same basic thing again, this time using the slightly-wider Karmann-Ghia chassis but still using Beetle mechanicals, along with the portal axles from the VW Type 2 bus. The result was a very rugged and flexible do-whatever vehicle with basic, corrugated bodywork.

While the Type 181 was built for use by various militaries from 1968 to 1983 or so (and was still in use in some pretty recently!) the Thing is really best known because in addition to being a hard-working military machine, it was also just fun.

I mean, look how un-military and fun it could be, with people flaunting safety and having guitars and possibly recreational sex and maybe drugs:

Good times. And we all basically know about the Thing, so I probably don’t need to give a full history here. But what I do want to do is address one little strange detail of the VW Thing, something you may have noticed and wondered about!

So let me show you what I mean, on the very nice Thing VW brought to the event, which you can see here, squared off against the new Tiguan, which I can show you, because there’s no embargo, so calm down:

Okay, now, that’s a 1973 Thing, and like the Things before it going back to 1968, this is how it sucked air into its engine:

Vents! Fantastic, basic vents! You can see these on many, if not most, VW Type 181s:

Simple enough, right? Sure it is. So, why did VW all of a sudden start covering those vents with these strange boxes in 1974?

Here you can see the boxes in an ad:

By the way, $2,775 comes to about $18,000 today, so these weren’t particularly expensive, though they were more expensive than the more luxurious – and yes, I hear how ridiculous that sounds – Beetle, which was about $2,640 ($17,000-ish) that same year.

Those revised air intakes seem to cover the existing vents with that surprisingly large box, which has a set of air intakes on its top surface. So, what’s the point of these things? Sometimes they’re called “wader boxes” because were you to ford some deep water, these would likely make it possible for the engine to keep breathing in deeper water than those side-mounted intakes would have. So, they could be that?

Not quite! I mean, yes, they probably did work for that, but the real reason was sort of a cost-savings one, which seems strange since they’re adding parts here. I’ll explain.

You see, earlier Type 181s used an Eberspächer gas heater, which was an option on many VWs at the time. Here you can see the fantastic Edd China fixing one:

These heaters were extremely effective, but they weren’t really cheap. What was cheap is the way most air-cooled VWs heated the cabin, via heat exchanger boxes that uses the heat of exhaust gases to heat up fresh air. The original 181s didn’t use these, because they had twin mufflers that were mounted higher, where the heat exchangers usually went, and their exhaust exited through the rear bumper. This gave the Thing better ground clearance. You can see the gas heater and muffler setup highlighted here:

Again, this system had advantages, but it wasn’t cheap! So, when VW switched to the conventional heat exchanger system as used in the Beetle, and with the Beetle’s single muffler, the visible changes to the car were they freed up a bit of space in the front trunk and they installed those new air intake boxes.

The reason for the boxes was to guarantee that air drawn into the engine’s cooling fan (which would then be forced through the heat exchangers and into the ducts in the body) would be pulled from high enough to avoid being contaminated by exhaust, which would have been the case with the side intake vents!

That’s why! Because of VW’s strict policy on trying not to asphyxiate their customers, at least when convenient!

There are plenty of VW Thing enthusiasts and tinkerers who try cutting these air boxes into air scoops to get more cooling for more powerful engines, but the stock boxes actually seem to work pretty well, even if they don’t really look like they would.

There. Now you know far, far more than you likely wanted to about VW Thing air intakes.