You know about the Type 34 Ghia, right? Also known as the Type 3 Ghia, or the VW 1500 Ghia, it was another take on the Karmann-Ghia formula: take a mass-market car chassis and stick a much prettier body on it. VW did this with the Beetle chassis and the original Karmann-Ghia, which I once talked about on video:
…and then they did it again, in a more up-market version, on their Type 3 platform, and with new, crisp, “razor’s edge” styling, as you can see in a page from the same 1963 brochure I got the packaging picture from:
It’s a handsome car! But, I’m here to obsess over packaging, and that’s what I’m gonna do, since this thing had fantastic packaging. The basic VW flat-four engine was modified for the Type 3s by having the cooling fan mounted low on the crankshaft, the result of which was that the engine package became really flat, like a suitcase. This was crammed under the rear floor, giving most Type 3s trunks at front and rear.
The Type34 Ghia was even a bit different, because it was one of the very few car with three separate cargo areas: front trunk, rear trunk (which was admittedly pretty shallow, but still) and a third enclosed compartment behind the rear seat. The top pic shows the rear seat folded down, making an interior large luggage platform, full of Louis Vitton bags, and the black bag over the trunk, but another page shows the seat up, with a kid and his favorite birdcage (?) sitting there:
Behind the kid is a suitcase in the behind-the-seat luggage well, and behind that is the trunk over the engine. Amazing! All that cargo room in a small sports coupé! I love it! Also, a bird in a cage to entertain a kid on a road trip? I bet that kid bought a ton of Game Boys about 20 years later, just to make up for that. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/rules-of-the-internet/ The VW Karmann Ghia makes a great EV donor chassis. Relative to other production cars of its time, it had some decently slippery aero, with a drag coefficient of 0.39. Being that the complete ICE powered donor weighs in around 1,800 lbs, you could shove a modern Tesla system and an entry level Model 3 pack into it and get a 200 mile range. This is seriously a 200 Wh/mile car converted, stock body without any aerodynamic modifications or low rolling resistance tires. However, hobbyists who converted these cars in the 1990s cut the drag significantly with nothing but a front air dam and a smooth underbody tray and could get Wh/mile figures closer to 150-ish, and lop off another 20 Wh/mile or so with LRR tires. When I was looking for a donor chassis to convert to electric back in high school, a Karmann Ghia was at the top of the list of candidates. It’s a shame Karmann Ghias have gotten so rare and expensive. It doesn’t take a lot of power to make them go fast.
- Performance 2) Fuel efficiency I like them both in the dame vehicle. The way cars are designed deliberately makes these traits mutually exclusive, but there are plenty of prototypes that have been demonstrated that proves this doesn’t need to be so and in fact they can reinforce each other. The more efficient something is via load reduction, the less power it takes for that vehicle to go fast. Thanks for letting us know about this amazing little car, Torch! Some interesting facts. The Corvair Club Coupe was released in 1960 and the Type 34 in 1961. The Corvair outsold the Beetle more than 2 to 1 for the first 3 years. I’d love to have a sixties Porsche version of the Type 3 engine cooling layout, so we fancy types could have a (hot) rear trunk as well.
