For reasons only understandable to myself, my now-disbarred therapist (I’m not even certain that therapists have to pass a bar exam? It’s possible she was a lawyer, which would explain a lot, though not why she was able to prescribe medicine that she made herself in the back of her Econoline) and my former rabbi, I have an unusual appreciation of ads and press photographs of Volkswagen Beetle trunks, especially the ones from Super Beetles.
I think it’s because in these pictures, I can feel how excited and proud early 1970s Volkswagen was of their modest but significant achievement: nearly doubling the trunk volume of the Beetle. I mean, think about that! Taking your most popular small car, and while keeping about 75% of the body panels the same and the overall look pretty damn close, making the enclosed cargo area twice as big.
Has that ever happened before? Or since? Maybe, I suppose. Cars can vary a lot from generation to generation, after all. But still, this was a big deal, and was the single largest change to happen in the entire history of Beetledom.
We’re talking trunks, though, so let’s establish a baseline. Here’s what the standard Beetle’s trunk was like:
It’s usable, but not, you know, huge. That’s not a small suitcase in there, and I feel like I’ve packed more in mine, but you get the idea. It was about 4.9 cubic feet of space. Now, check out the trunk of a Super Beetle:
Wow wow wow, right? Look at that! The trunk was now 9.2 cubic feet! Look how many more suitcases they crammed in there! Sure, they’re going to squish down that top bag to close the lid, but as long as it’s not full of puppies, who cares? So, how did they do it?
It was primarily a suspension change that bought all that extra space. The biggest change that made the Super Beetle what it was had to do with the replacement of the Beetle’s tried-and-true torsion bar suspension system with a MacPherson strut setup. Not only did this reduce the turning circle and give the Beetle a much more modern front suspension setup, the physical nature of these struts left a lot more unused volume between the wheels, which could be used for the trunk.
You can see all that space up front there on that photo of the bare Super Beetle chassis, between those two front struts. Look at all that space! Maybe “sports car chassis” is pushing it a bit, but still.
Here, let’s compare the trunk volumes in these cutaways:
As you can see, the double torsion bar front suspension on a standard Beetle, as rugged and well-designed as it was, took up a lot of vertical room, and extended the full width of the car. This meant that the load floor was pretty high, as the fuel tank had to stack atop the torsion tubes, leaving only 4.9 cubic feet under the hood.
There was also a rear luggage well, also 4.9 cubic feet, a weird coincidence considering I don’t think anyone at VW had this volumetric symmetry as a goal?
Now look at that Super Beetle trunk. The load floor drops all the way to the bumper, the spare tire is mounted horizontally below everything, and there’s nearly double the amount of space. I feel like VW was always a little sheepish about the small trunk in the Beetle, so this really meant a lot to them. If we add the front trunk’s 9.2 cubic feet to the rear well’s 4.9, we get a very respectable 14.1 cubic feet of space.
Really, the Beetle wasn’t that far off a lot of its competition. The first-generation Honda Civic, for example, only had a trunk about 8 cubic feet in volume. A Mini only had about 4 cubic feet, but that was a significantly smaller car overall.
Let’s look at how excited VW seemed to be about this new colossal trunk!
Lots of their brochures showed the vast inky blackness of that cardboard-lined trunk, along with a set of luggage that could be crammed in there. VW’s photographers seemed to enjoy this, but I think this is the brochure image that really expresses the unhinged glee Volkswagen body engineers were feeling at all this lebensraum:
Look at that! A whole baseball (oops: softball, I’ve been corrected) team, just flinging their equipment in that Super Beetle trunk with the ruthless abandon of falling autumn leaves! There are mitts and shoes and boxes of stuff and some bases and yes, bats, bats, so many bats! That are fitting without having to get buzz-sawed into pieces! And everyone is just tossing crap in there, free from the constraints of having to carefully plan and pack and Tetris all your stuff in there!
Oh, it’s dizzying, the freedom of a big trunk!
There’s another very proud Super Beetle trunk promotional image that I’ve been searching for, but I can’t find, and it’s driving me batguano. It was a picture of a Super Beetle, hood open, with a trunk filled with crates of bottles. I know I’ve seen it, I can picture it, but I just can’t find the damn thing online! Or in any of my books!
It looks like this:
Why can’t I find this damn picture? It’s driving me bizzonkers. Have any of you seen this picture? I’m not imagining it, right? If anyone has a lead on this, please stick it in the comments so I can finally get some peace.
Speaking of trunks, let’s address the elephant in the room. Can we come up with actually useful units of measure? Cubic feet might be fine, but what about shape? Shallow/high, long/low, odd protrusions? None of this is useful. Unless someone is thinking of transporting liquids. The images here suggest some sort of luggage unit of measure. Others have suggested how many cases of beer will fit without having to open said cases.Can we just find something actually useful?
I’m firmly against misogyny, but sadly the best I have seen in the ‘dead hooker’ unit of measure. In that case the Beetle totally fails. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Alanis King’s already got you covered.
A chainsaw isn’t only the perfect tool to repair a Changli. It might help fitting the dead hooker into the Beetle’s trunk, too.
I regret starting this. Please don’t go there. Even in jest.
We’ll sanitize it to “How many T.J. Hookers can you get in the trunk?”
Sorry, have to ask. What is a tong? Is it a crotchless thong? Please done take offence…
The ‘tong’ referenced is the tong used to haul felled trees out of the woods. (Or tongs or ‘pair of tongs’.)
Tong Throwing uses a backhoe to throw the tongs really far, by whipping them around like a slingshot or a bolas.
Video explains better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnJJykTPoJY
I see your point. Sorry!
Gallons?
I thought only elephant beetles had trunks.
This article shows a comparison between the 1200 and the 1302 based on (European) Pepsi crates. Are these the pictures you had in mind?
https://sowirdsgemacht.com/articles/view/die-kaefer-familie
I hope this works
https://images.sowirdsgemacht.com/article-images/2014/05/1970-11_Die-Ke4fer-Familie-6.jpg
https://images.sowirdsgemacht.com/article-images/2014/05/1970-11_Die-Ke4fer-Familie-7.jpg
This one seems to be an official VW promotion picture. Unfortunately, the crates are placed outside the trunk.
https://cdn.autopapo.com.br/box/uploads/2025/06/20131254/volkswagen-fusca_kafer_1302-porta-malas-aberto.jpeg
OMG! Is it possible that Jason made a mistake on his picture comparing the windshields of Beetle vs Super Beetle? Could both pictures be Super Beetles?
To my feeble, former Beetle owner memory, the differentiator between the two was a smaller gap between the gas cap and the fender on the Beetle. I went down a rabbit hole looking for pics to compare (sorry boss!). The pics seem to confirm it. On Jason’s pic, the gaps looks the same.
A further check shows that the two first years of the Super Beetle had pretty flat windshields, so the windshield alone may not be a good indicator.
Did Jason get it wrong? Or are my eyes as bad as my memory? Do I get some kind of award if I got this right?
I am pretty sure there were flat-windshield Super Beetles
Wikipedia says the 1972 1302 Super Beetle (with the MacPherson strut front suspension) had a flat windscreen, the 1973 1303 got the curved windscreen
I understand the picture in the article as showing both kinds of Super Beetle (the 1302 with the flat windshield and the 1303 with the curved one) rather than a comparison with the old one. Both the 1302 and the 1303 have the new suspension.
Ex-Exeo, you are correct. How dare I doubt the great Torch-carrier of all things Beetle!
Anybody else here get the vibe that Jason is running the gamut of fake it until you make it triviata on the Beetle? I do forgive him. He’s got a lot of taillights on his mind.
My only Beetle was a ’72 Super. It was good, actually. There is a woman in our neighborhood that drives a ’71 Super and has had it since we moved in 37 years ago. I so admire the stick with it attitude!
And the stick with a stick attitude.
“It still works, why switch?”
I need an RSS feed of Just Jason.
I find it so cool that Jason can notice the smallest detail on a VW, but miss judging the size of ones balls!
Thanks to the largely inefficient packaging of modern cars, I’ve found it’s the shape as much as the volume that matters. Volume that is primarily vertical is a lot less useful than horizontal and space that exists within a domed area of a descending roofline or between thick side interior trim and windows add a lot of advertisable volume that is functionally nearly useless. The Super Beetle not only has more volume than the older one, but it’s better space, as well.
I’m always impressed with the combination of shapes in the Boxster’s front and rear trunks. Both are as big as a Z3’s trunk, but one is wider and flatter, and the other is far deeper. In the back, I have enough flat width for a guitar in a soft case, and up front I have the depth for two upright buckets from the hardware store.
The only issue is the trunk gets a bit too warm for fresh groceries, so I have to carefully stack those up in the relatively narrow frunk for larger supply runs.
I’ve found it’s the shape as much as the volume that matters.
That’s what she said.
Yeah, a standard door is only 3 cubic feet, but try finding a car that will hold one.
TEAM 1302 4 LYFE
*attempts pseudo gang sign finger thing*
We don’t need no stinking curved windshields! My family had a blue one when I was born in 1973. I remember it fondly from later times when my grandfather drove it (these newfangled “booster seats” didn’t quite fit even in the 1302/1303, you know).
Can we talk about the delicious candy colors? Especially that medium green that matches the park benches and bleachers at the local little league field we all had nearby in the early 80s when lots of these were still chirping around?
I find this pretty interesting that a suspension change can free up that much space, quite the packaging win there.
Only very vaguely related, but I wonder how much interior room is lost on modern vehicles due to the never ending quest for larger wheels and tires. Seems like even enlarging the tires by “just” a couple inches must make for larger wheel wheels, more suspension space claim, especially on the steering axle(s), and probably makes a significant impact to the packaging space available internally. Add in a bigger spare tire, on the probably 3% of vehicles that still have one, and the space lost would only increase.
A rear suspension tweak on the Ford Ranger between ’23 and ’24 made room for full 4-foot wide sheet material (drywall, plywood.)
Not a huge change in volume, but a world of difference in real-world usability. (Except, the ’24 and later US trucks are all crew cabs, so the length of the bed is shorter…)
Around the same time the Super Beetle was introduced, Volvo was transitioning the 140 series into the 240 series. The front suspension was changed from double A-arm to Mac struts. Not for more cargo room, obviously, but so a *wider* engine could be fitted. It was originally supposed to be a V-8, but then the fuel crisis hit and it became home to the PRV V-6.
The spare tire is part of the trick. Storing it horizontally instead of nearly vertically opened up a vast plateau of space right in front (look at the cutaways in Jason’s article).
That said, I wonder what the suitcase manufacturers made of the Super Beetle. There had been a huge market for suitcases tailored to the Beetle’s trunk and luggage well.
Your drawing looks like a Tweetle Beetle in a puddle looking for a bottle battle.
Reading that supposed child’s book to my son is often the hardest thing I will do that day
I remember riding around in the rear luggage well of my dad’s ’68 beetle. Mom had a superbeetle, but it was a lemon and was sold before I bonded with it. I never liked the superbeetle shape, interior, and especially disliked the wider the tail lamps and side lamps. Everything was just fatter. The ’68 is the one for me.
Is anyone else getting hit with “waiting for approval”? The last few times I’ve posted a comment half of the time they get held up even though they’ve all been innocuous enough, good grief.
One wonders if the comment moderation department is using AI to flag comments…
There are a lot of buzzwords that trigger the flagging. It happened to me when I used the often-maligned word for “progressive”, even though I did so approvingly.
I was quite happy another comment was kept in limbo when my spellcheck (set to German) didn’t know the word bigger and “corrected” the first letter to a slur it knew but definitely shouldn’t. The forum police gave me enough time to change it back.
Where did you find a 1303 with the fuel filler on the left? Is that Australian?
Kidding! But there’s definitely something to be noted about where the fuel tank went over the years, and how it affected usable volume. The first pic has the filler neck in the frunk (I’m not sure where the spare tire is in that one) and the later ones moved it to where Henry Ford put it, under the windshield.
Staying tuned, especially since I know I’ve also seen such a promotional image of a bottle-filled SB frunk unless it’s a mass hallucination (would two people with the same hallucination constitute a mass hallucination?) or a case of the Mandela effect, lol.
(Would the Mandela effect be considered as a mass hallucination?)
My best guess is that it was in an issue of LIFE magazine. In my childhood my parents subscribed to just a few magazines: National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Horizon (from American Heritage) with a short-lived subscription to LIFE. IIRC, of those magazines National Geographic and LIFE were the ones most likely to have ads for VW.
However, attending many a VW show in the 1990s through the 2010s (since my kids became full-fledged adults with their own domiciles & all I’ve attended only a few shows) I did see a lot of brochures, magazine clippings, & dealership materials so that might very well be where I saw the bottle-filled SB frunk.
Such a damn shame what’s happened with SEO. Yeah, online searches have become all but useless, alas…
And the moved the gas tank further up in your lap on the Super Beetle!
I’ve never thought about that before.
But they probably added some more safety somehow too – you win some, you loose some 😉
I’m pretty sure I’ve been infected by all the Beetle content over the last ~10 years. When I see a decent one for sale locally, I’m getting verrrrry tempted. I 100% blame Torch for this.
You might even be able to score a non decent one for free and turn it into whatever you want.
Same here. a ’74 Super went on sale for about $6k near me. I drove by it repeatedly but just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Here we are a year later and I still wish I had, even though there are many practical reasons I didn’t.
And it’s all Torch’s fault.
“I have an unusual appreciation of ads and press photographs of Volkswagen Beetle trunks, especially the ones from Super Beetles.”
Oh, my, God Becky, look at that trunk
It is so big, it looks like
One of those Autopian guys’ shrimp coolers
But, ya know, who understands those Autopian guys?
They only drive it, because,
It looks like a total shitbox, ‘kay?
I mean, that trunk, is just so big
I can’t believe it’s just so round, it’s like out there
I mean gross, look
It’s just so, whack!
Did the Super Beetle keep the same hood, or was is a bit higher/larger for part of that extra volume?
It was bigger and re-shaped a bit, along with the front fenders and front apron!
It always looked like it had a fat lip from getting punched in the face to me.
Sorry for being “that guy”.
But they are a softball team not baseball. Just look at the size of their balls…in the trunk.
And these guys are all old. Probably just finished the game and crammed all their crap in there so they can hit the bar for the celebratory imbibing.
The bottles of beer in the trunk would be next week’s game.
Hey… that’s my job
Apologies.
I thought you were still on sabbatical.
It’s all fun and games
I wonder exactly how many German softball teams there were for VW to photo. Maybe Hogan’s Heroes taught them how to play.
“Vee haff vays oof making you valk!”
At least one of those guys’ first drive of a VW was when he and his buddies captured one.
Torch likes big frunks and he cannot lie
You other brothers can’t deny
That when a bug drives up with an itty bitty frunk
And a round spare in your face, you get sprung
Wanna pull up tough ’cause you notice that frunk was stuffed
I remember when I showed you my frunk of my SB in the walmart parking lot in Troy, MI and you were very happy how clean and pristine it was (Cardboard separating the spare wheel still intact). I didnt understood back then but now I see why lol
Oh I was very happy.
Thanks for the memory. Not a good one at that. Yesterday I mentioned the hatred of my stepmother via that Peugeot.
Today it’s a memory of being crammed in the back seat of her first gen Civic with my brother. I was… 9?
We shared that back seat with a chest-of-drawers for 2 hours on the ride up to the house in RI. I remember VERY little in life, and you go and bring up a doozy.
Happy Friday!