The 4 cam engine from the 356. Hellishly complex, extremely rare, and insanely expensive to rebuild. But if you've ever heard one run.....

Would you ask a father to choose his favorite child?
Each of the choices has its merits, and I won't play favorites.
I love them all.

The Tatra 603 is the only air-cooled engine for me.

Why did I vote for the engine that nearly got me killed because it couldn't get me out of harm's way fast enough? I guess I'm just sentimental.

Did I mention that it was coupled to Volkswagen's legendary Automatic Stick Shift (A.S.S.) transmission?

Although it is conceptually similar, the pushrod Porsche 356 engine as we know it (1300-1600cc) shares no major components (case, heads, crank, etc.) with any VW engines. I'd have a lot more money today if I could have used VW pieces for my 356 engines. It should not be included in this poll.

Imagine my joy at opening the page and finding this engine. I am currently working on my sixth air-cooled VW (a "fast"back) and can truthfully say I have dealt with all VW-produced variations. The Type 4/914 engine was the Jekyll/Hyde sort; when it ran, it was great. Learning about the Type 3 has been interesting, but the novelty of the "where's the engine?" game wears thin when balancing carbs for the 27th time... which leaves us with the best of 'em all - the 1200cc 40 hp that powered my 1963 Ghia. Uncounted miles on the clock, had never been out of the car, yet still sang along I-5 at 70 and returned 30+ mpg.
BEST
ENGINE
EVER

I was waiting for this one. Any engine you and a buddy can lift out of a car by hand is the sex in my book. Just don't ever throw one of these blocks on a beach bonfire...

@Spence:

Used to do it all the time. The generator stands in particular. Then throw a bucket of seawater at it. You can see it from space....

Forgot to mention: First engine I ever totally disassembled was a Type 3. You get spoiled with a car engine you can lift onto a workbench by yourself (not to mention removable cylinders).

And this is the only 4-cylinder/4-stroke engine I've ever seen that will run on one cylinder. In fact, probably a fair number of Beetles are driving around on one cylinder at this very moment.

@Vintage Racer: I still am wary whenever I see a cop in Laguna Beach...

I sent Jonny L an email pestering him to make sure this, my favorite engine, would be in here. So I'm delighted.

Plus, for anyone who doubts the plucky, rattly power of this little engine, please note that in college I towed a girlfriend's dead Dodge Duster with my '73 Beetle. Up a hill. And with the semi-auto transaxle. I felt like Emperor of the Idiots.

I still have that bug, and nothing makes me as happy as that air-cooled clatter.

@junkman: Well, I was kind of on the fence about including the 356 engine, but since it did evolve from the original VW design I figured it should be included. Still, your point is valid.

Sure, you could say something bad about this engine, but it might hear you and the next time you're stranded two hours from home and the main oil seal blows out you won't by some miracle make it all the way home with no oil pressure at all, stopping every dozen miles to pour more oil in the case, and find no real damage done at all. No engine takes more abuse, period.

There's a story in the Muir book about a guy who lost the keys to his Beetle's deck lid and so drove his Beetle without opening the engine compartment for 100,000 miles, pre-synethic oil and with solid lifters. And only now are we building modern engines that can take that kind of abuse.

If I had to drive across an inhospitable landscape, say the Great Race from New York to Paris or the Paris Dakar route, there's no engine I'd rather take with me.

@brandonvalentine: Hmmm... I've seen some Slant Sixes take even more horrendous abuse and work just fine- I think I'd opt for Slant Six over VW air-cooled in an endurance contest. Sounds like a good poll question when I do a Leaning Tower of Power WEOTD!

I'm not looking anything up, but any engine that has a competition/record for disassembly/reassembly while blindfolded deserves some serious cred.

As I recall, that record is disturbingly fast, too.

One of my dad's friends had a Baja Bug with a 1500cc Type 1 motor. For some strange reason, it ran excellent when the timing was advanced 26 degrees from stock, right up until the #3 exhaust valve broke free, bounced around in the cylinder, and punched a hole in the engine block.

I've seen several more of these motors fail since then, and my experience is that when they do fail, they do so in an epic manner.

Never had the opportunity to re-build this engine, though I did cut my teeth on rebuilding three Corvair engines, one for my mom's '61 Monza, one for my dad's '63 Greenbriar Van (with a 4 Speed), and my '66 Monza Convertible. I never realized the VW engine also had removable cylinders, and thanks for that little bit of info!

Anyway, I didn't vote in the poll because I don't know enough about the different types to make an informed choice.

Yeah, well, some nerds can do a Rubik's blindfolded in 5 seconds but that doesn't make the cube cool.

My second, third, fourth, fifth... wait, how many damned VW's did I have... My favorite car that I EVER owned was my sandrail. That 1678cc was pushed to hell and back in every situation. I flogged the snot out of it, drowned it (numerous times), jumped with it, etc. It always got me home, although I did keep a supply of spare parts in the box behind the seat. A friend drove his bug over to my house so we could put another engine in it. He told me it was running really bad. After pulling the engine and lifting the shroud off, we discovered that a rod had broken, shattering the cam into 3 pieces and breaking a hole in the top of the case the size of a dollar bill. It even broke the oil cooler off the top of the engine. He drove it 25 miles to get to my house.

I remember the interview the captain of my high school wrestling team gave for the school newspaper about his car, which everyone laughed at, seeing that six foot something giant cram into that tiny old blue beetle. He called it his muscle car, 'cuz it took a lot of muscle to push it all the way back home. Awesome.

@skaz: same.

@Murilee Martin: at the repair shop i work at we only have one customer that has a car older than 1985. that car is a 1963 dart with a slant six. the odometer has turned over so many times in that car we dont even know how many miles are on it. i would definitly take that over some vw.

@Murilee Martin: I'm a fan of the slant six myself. I gotta say though, if I were in the middle of a desert somewhere with nothing but what I had in the car to get me home, I think I'd prefer an aircooled motor. Fewer cooling system parts to go wrong - no blown radiators, hoses, gaskets, etc. And I wouldn't have to pour my drinking water into the engine. You gotta admit, that's a definite advantage. Though many VW drivers never figured it out, all you have to do to keep a VW engine cool is keep the revs up. Counterintuitive, but true. And as the temperature gets hotter there's zero chance your engine is going to start pumping exhaust into the water and overpressurize the cooling system or that oil and water are going to mix.

@brandonvalentine: As a native of Southern California and Utah who has owned a number of air-cooled VW's, I gotta say that you'd still be crazy driving that thing in the middle of the desert!

I've got to go with Vintage Racer and say the DOHC Porsche 356 "Carrera" motor!

I love my 1600cc dp Even fucked up it still runs great and I can also hit 70 on i5. That's in my ratty 1971 Camper bus

At first I was going to vote for the Type 1 engine, as it was the first engine I ever had to rebuild, but then I went for the 356 (912 should be included with that one too) as I am currently rebuilding a 1720cc 912 right now. Think of it as good Porsche karma. I loved the type 1 before beacause it was such a great learning experience but I love the 1720 now becuase it is going to be such a screamer in my fake plastic bathtub!!

The VW 1.8l 8v RD, 2.0l 8v ABA, and 2.0l 16v ABF are nice.
Audi had the 20v 1.8T first though, before GTIs.
I think the VR6s still like to eat timing chains; I know the '94 AAA did.

@junkman: The very early 356 engines (1100cc) were VW (sourced) engines with twin carbs, tuned from 25hp to 40hp. Within a few years, parts increasingly became Porsche's own. But it all started with Beetle engines.

I'm sure they were great when they were first introduced. But by the time they made it to the U.S., they seem outclassed by comparison to American economy cars, such as the Nash Rambler. I've owned two aircooled VWs and I can report that they are slow, require constant valve, timing, and points adjustments, and eat condensers. Not to mention that most were equipped with an inadequate heating system that, if not maintained, will channel carbon monoxide into the car. I think their success is largely explained by great marketing campaigns.

Take a look at the base 4 cylinders in today's "people's cars," which are Hyundais, Kias, Aveos, Corollas, etc. and try to get excited. It's just not possible.

Then take a look at the VW flat 4. So what if modern engines can be more fuel efficent, more reliable, more powerful, and cleaner? None of that matters once you start this engine up. It might be *dangeously* slow in unmodified form, but the sound alone turns every modern four cylinder into an apologetic hunk of metal.

You won't find any of this engineering in back page data panels. This here's the real deal. This is what they mean when they say, "They sure don't build 'em like they used to." This is oldschool from an era when cars wore their fins on the inside. This is the unquantifiable form that goes missing in today's P.C. sterilized automobiles. This is CHARACTER with four horizontally opposed pistons.

I have a write-in for the 912, also.

Point-of-info (contention?): Aren't all these Porsche-developed engines, just some used by VW? The 356 is certainly all Fergi ("My Jugs, My Jugs, My lovely air-cooled Jugs")...

@pauln: You're absolutely right about the 1100cc engine and that's why I specified the 1300-1600cc 356 engines in my comments. The 1100cc (actually 1088) unit was only installed in a very small number of extremely early cars until Porsche developed their own engines.

I knew this was coming, and I'm glad it's here.

Now, I've never owned a VW anything, but I've always loved the VW mystique. I've known a couple, and the range of ability of the guys who kept them alive was something else. One guy needed two tries to find the pointy end of the screwdriver, and the other was an actual VW mechanic. They both had cars they worked on themselves, and both ran fine.

@morrisseyscoot: Me too. The motor's the last thing I worry about on my ratty '70 Campmobile.

Best motor? The workhouse 1200. A relatively stock example won it's class twice in the horrendous Safari Rally (including one of the wettest races on record). It was probably the most important version because it established the brand globally and led to huge sales in the U.S. in the 1960s.

A Slant Six is unburstable, too, but it's also massively overbuilt. A Beetle engine you can practically lift yourself.

I'm with brandegee on the 1200. Additionally, it was the base motor for the original Formula Vee race class which singlehandedly kept open wheel racing accessible to the American masses.

Ahhh, the old air cooled flat-4 VW. If it wasn't leaking oil, that usually meant that there wasn't any! Still, it got me over the mountains on 3 cylinders...not fast, mind you, but it still did the deed.

70 years of manufacture, 100's of journeys by wandering nomads across the country with 3 dollars and a joint because they could. In a van that could seat six, in sports cars, an economical wonder on three main bearings...if I could describe my frown at the word "Subaru" at this moment. VW air cooled is a legend.

I wonder if Subaru learned anything by them. The air cooled vw was extreme, stable thermals needed a stable heat, not a good engine where I live realistically (seasons). The liquid cooled vw van however...

I still run a 1500 in my daily driver 66 bus. A while back, me and a female friend dropped the engine and transmission between shifts at work to replace the transmission mounts, because the originals had completely disintegrated. If I went up I steep hill, or went driving in rough terrain I could feel the drive train shift with a bump. Anyway, we swapped them out, and had the the engine back in by the time I had to go to work. It gets up to such terrifying speeds of 20 mph over Vail pass with tractor trailers passing like I'm standing still.