I really should get some sleep soon since I need to be alert and personable and I’m going to be doing an awful lot of laps in my Citroën 2CV tomorrow at our 1rd Members Only Track Day that I’ve not shut up about for days, but here I am not sleeping, for predictably inane reasons.
Well, multiple inane reasons, really. I thought I lost the 2CV keys earlier today, and I’m still riding that relief high that one gets when a genuinely miserable situation appears to rear its ugly, misshapen head at you, but then, wonderfully, gets solved. The feeling of lightness when you realize you’re not as boned as you thought, oh, it’s magical. So there’s that, and then my kid is convinced there are huge frogs just outside, and he saw one and now wants my help in finding more, for reasons he’s not willing to divulge.
And then there’s this picture that’s occupying my mind for reasons that are less obvious:
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Now, right away, it’s an odd image, sure. There’s a Beetle – it looks like a ’73 to me, Euro-spec – and it’s perched atop what I think is a 1960 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, which also seems to be in Europe, but not a Euro-spec car, as the license plate is mounted above the much smaller US-spec license plate recess. The Caddy has a CH sticker on the car, which means Confereratio Helvetica, which we know as Switzerland. So maybe some Swiss artist mounted a Beetle atop a Cadillac?
All of that is weird, sure. And I’ve done more than one reverse image searches, and it seems that post from SuperBeetles.com is the only example of that image. I don’t believe it’s AI, either, as the details of the cars are too accurate for what AI usually produces, and I don’t see the telltale weirdness in the letterforms. I don’t think this is AI, and I feel I may have encountered this image a few years back, prior to the proliferation of AI imagery.
But it’s not the overall image that’s so weird to me; artists have been doing weird things with Beetles for decades; remember how Chris Burden nailed himself to one back in 1974?
Oh yeah, good times. No, it’s not the overall image itself that interests me, it’s this one detail:
Look! That Beetle has a rear window wiper! This was not an accessory that Volkswagen officially offered, and if it was an aftermarket accessory, it is wildly rare. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Beetle with a rear wiper before, or, really, any air-cooled VW of that era? It looks like a really tidy installation, though, and I know that vent area under the rear window actually would likely have enough space to house a wiper motor and gearing, so this is definitely possible – so how is this the first place I’ve encountered one of these?
Here’s something else interesting: while rear window wipers have definitely existed since the 1940s or so, and there were some incredible, if limited-run, early examples, like the four rear wipers on the 1957 Lancia Flamina sedan:
There’s two on the outside of the window and two on the inside. That’s bonkers. If you were wealthy and obsessed with a clear view behind you in the late ’50s, there was really no other car for you.
Porsche seems to be one of the early adopters of the idea on any sort of scale, starting in 1966. Sure, Mercury seems to have offered them in the late 1940s, and Porsche had one-off requests for rear wipers on 356s (starting with bronze medal-winning Olympic yacht racer Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach), which is what made them realize there was a demand from people to be able to see behind them, leading to their development of a rear wiper accessory for the Porsche 911.
The installation of this Porsche rear wiper setup really isn’t all that different from what is seen on that Beetle there. Same general shape of window, same location by the air intakes of a rear-engine – could the unit on the VW be adapted from this Porsche unit? The wiper arm shape is pretty different, though.
Was this a one-off? A locally-built Swiss aftermarket kit? A prototype? I have no idea. But I would love to know. I’d love to even see another example of a Beetle with a rear wiper pretty much anywhere!
It’s a mystery! A beautiful mystery! And tomorrow is our track day! What a world.
A post about rear wipers. A little something for the morning loo visit, eh?
The plate on the Bug does say DU DU…
BRILLIANT!
Not AI, but maybe Photoshop? The proportions look off between the two cars; the Beetle looks too big. I guess you’d have to cut the image apart and put them side by side to really tell, but this feels like some elaborate fakery to me.
Thinking about it, the rear suspension should have a lot more droop if this was a complete, or even engineless car. I remember from lifting mine it takes quite a bit to lift the rear wheels off the ground.
Grew up in air-cooled bugs, was part of the community for a couple decades, and I’ve never seen a rear wiper on a Beetle, standard or super.
Pretty cool
Yes, that’s a ’60 4-window Caddy hardtop. I can’t believe those four thin pillars can hold a Beetle without collapsing on the driver.