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.
I wonder if the wiper motor doubled the horse power?
It halved it when it was on.
Dang. Online searching turns up nothing (other than this very article, lol) thanks to SEO ensh*ttification and AI (when I switched from NoAIDuckDuckGo to Google I forgot to add “-ai” so the AI-generated results on Google were just utterly atrocious) but I’m still trying…
I know that in the 90s I did indeed see pictures (not many, tho!) of Beetles with rear window wipers in VW magazines such as VW Trends, Hot VWs and Dune Buggies, VolksWorld, etc, etc. Not a whole lot of those 30-something-year-old magazines have been digitized, alas…
IIRC, it seemed to be most common in Australia where some of the VW dealers offered it as a dealer-installed accessory, sometimes along with windshield (uh, rear window) wiper fluid sprayers on account of all the dust so prevalent on some Australian roads back in those days.
Once got a fleeting glimpse of a Type 3 Notchback with a rear window wiper in passing at a VW meet (in fact I think that one might actually have been from New Zealand.)
Maybe Laurence Rogers or Zoe Skyforest could get on the case since they’d be local…
Dang. Online searching turns up nothing (other than this very article, lol) thanks to SEO enshittification and AI (when I switched from NoAIDuckDuckGo to Google I forgot to add “-ai” so the AI-generated results on Google were just utterly atrocious) but I’m still trying…
I know that in the 90s I did indeed see pictures (not many, tho!) of Beetles with rear window wipers in VW magazines such as VW Trends, Hot VWs and Dune Buggies, VolksWorld, etc, etc. Not a whole lot of those 30-something-year-old magazines have been digitized, alas…
IIRC, it seemed to be most common in Australia where some of the VW dealers offered it as a dealer-installed accessory, sometimes along with windshield (uh, rear window) wiper fluid sprayers on account of all the dust so prevalent on some Australian roads back in those days.
Once got a fleeting glimpse of a Type 3 Notchback with a rear window wiper in passing at a VW meet (in fact I think that one might actually have been from New Zealand.)
Laurence Rogers or Zoe Skyforest could get on the case since they’d be local…
Congratulations Jason, welcome to the Fluxus. Please enjoy the squeegee sounds of the rear wiper of our prepared Beetle. It’s being delivered to you right now.
Fun fact: The Beetle was already in a crappy state before being mounted. It was the Swiss government’s 926th assessment to come back as truly excrementory. That’s why it got the DU DU license plate.
Another morning, another trip over to the Autopian for a fresh cup of “WTH?”.
Speaking of details, I’m not sure that is actually a Sedan deVille. It’s definitely a ’60 Cadillac, but I’m guessing it’s a base-model Series 62. The deVilles were a step up, optioned with more equipment, and if I remember correctly, one of the ways to spot them from the exterior is to look for a small script emblem above the center chrome strip at the rear of the car (which isn’t there in the pic).
Even though it’s non-wiper and non-bug related, it is physically located near the taillights and I figured you’d appreciate the pedantry :-).
It’s actually a Sedan deVWille.
From the same dictionary as Twrenchfoot
Torch:
Super Beetle mounted to the top of a 60 Caddy? Cool.
Windshield wiper on the back of the same Beetle? I MUST UNDERSTAND HOW THIS CAME TO BE
I saw a quad rear wiper Flaminia at Concours d’Lemons years back and it blew my mind.
That two-tone blue one pictured in the linked R&T article has been floating around SoCal for ages, but every time I go down to LA for Best of France and Italy is a year that car’s owner decides to skip the show, so I’ve never actually seen it in person. Was that the one you saw?
My grandparents had a used Series I Flaminia Berlina as a family car in the mid-’60s. It had cracking black lacquer paint on the outside and cracking black leather on the inside. My mom hated it because all of her friends’ parents had normal Country Squire wagons and her parents had this weird Italian gangster car. My grandmother loved it because it was so glamorous. A core memory of my mother’s is the car breaking down on Hollywood Boulevard, and my grandfather making his wife and four little girls get out and push the car down the busy street—he couldn’t help because he had to steer, obviously!
I have a couple of old snapshots with that Flaminia in it, but I’ve never actually gotten to see any Berlina up close in person. Someday…
I just checked the photo I took and indeed the car I saw was black and powder blue, so chances are it’s the same one.
Have an air cooled fan-tastic day today!!!
Supposedly VDO and SWF offered aftermarket “clip-on” style rear wipers for Beetles in Europe in the 70s. VDO I’ve heard of, SWF not so much. I’m aware of aftermarket rear wipers for Type 2 VWs, but not Beetles, although anything is possible. Haven’t found a definitive source for this info, so maybe apocryphal.
I can help with that: That’s a scene from the 1973 film „Superbug On Extratour“ (in German: *Dudu – Ein Käfer auf Extratour*) – a sort of German answer to the success of the *Herbie* movies. There was a whole series of „Dudu“ movies in the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbug_(film_series)
„Dudu“ is a Beetle with many special powers and features, obviously including a rear wiper. The rather bizarre car chase scene can be found here, starting shortly before the 30 minute mark:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-6KIGQqu0&pp=ygUVc3VwZXJidWcgb24gZXh0cmF0b3Vy&ra=m
Nice Marmot!
And watching this will be the reason Jason is late for his laps today
The whole „Dudu“ series should be a treat for Jason (and for Beetle lovers in general). A really weird mixture of „Herbie“ and „KITT“.
I just checked the English dubbing – it really captures the goofy vibes of the German original.
Excellent contribution, thank you. Seems they shot some parts in Switzerland, around Zurich, which explains the Zurich plates of the Caddy (Switzerland had a disproportionate amount of GM cars, given there was an assembly plant and no other local car OEM producing in big numbers). Here also some more pictures:
https://sebeetles.com/dudu/
You can see the rear wiper in the third photo with the nun. What’s interesting is that it appears to be a factory addition. The vents under the window are configured to make room for the wiper.
So the rear wiper is for clearing away all the Dudu
Hah! You said, “Big Member!”
A post about rear wipers. A little something for the morning loo visit, eh?
The plate on the Bug does say DU DU…
BRILLIANT!
It is, one might say, a regular topic of conversation around these parts.
Wiper posts. I’m here for it.
Also have ‘B. Three wipers FTW.
Mine has moved on, but to another Autopian member who is working hard on the things that made me give up, plus many new issues that have come forward. I’m enjoying the reliability of a 06 Miata instead now, but that B was still a ton of fun, and I can totally see having another MG in my life in the future.
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.
It‘s been a film prop. So yes, probably a lot lighter than a fully operational Beetle.
I meant distance, not weight. There’s a lot of downtravel in Beetle suspension, especially at the back. I guess if it’s a prop they probably either replaced the shocks or welded the rear arms in place.
Ah, I understand. You‘re perfectly right.
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.
All I can think of is that the VW’s significantly lightened, not just no engine or interior, but no pan or even a fiberglass mockup of a Beetle body, if it’s indeed sitting on top of the Caddy without visible stiffening of the roof.
It‘s been a film prop. So yes, probably a lot lighter than a fully operational Beetle.