1973 Volkswagen Type III review from North America

A no-start was traced to a loose connector at the manifold sensor.

An excellent little road car. Bravely slices and dices urban traffic, just a little anemic when you need to point and squirt. The little 165 tires hung on good when I pulled off the accelerate-on-the-diminishing radius onramps to see if the Hyundai would keep up with me which it would not.

Settles in very nicely at 73-75 mph with a decent pull in 3rd gear to 50 mph as you enter the onramp (it'll give you 60 in 3rd briefly), it has a rather busy chassis movement on CA expansion joints and very nice communicative steering, the key is to ignore most of the feedback or you'll find yourself correcting things that need no correction. The rubber suspension mountings do add a little rear wheel steering tendency to any chassis loading. An avoidant swerve to miss a large piece of truck tire had the suspension seemingly coiling up against its rubber. When the transient swerve came in, the car was a little too happy to assume an oversteering attitude. A little unnerving at first. Wind was not an issue, it pushes the front end a little, but never did it threaten to shove the car into an adjacent lane.

This particular Type III was a real pussycat in traffic. I refuse to try to keep up with the stupid acceleration into the next clot of brake lights like so many people do. So, like in the bus, some people behind me were not expecting my 1st/2nd shift at 15 mph when they were all ready to launch up to speed seamlessly.

Days on end, this car grabs you with its plucky loyalty on the road. You get in on day nine of freeway driving with the same sort of anticipation as day two. When the temperatures plummeted in eastern Texas, I discovered that the heat is truly fierce. It burned my bananas right in half on the floor behind the driver's seat.

A surprise to me, the dowdy little Type III engenders as many comments and recollections as the bus does. It is an air-cooled VW in every way.