Once again, VW's reluctance to mess with Type 1 design means I can't be 100% sure I have the year right on this one (though it's obviously not a Super Beetle). The vents behind the rear side windows means it's a '71 or later, and the taillights and bumpers say it's non-Malaise. I'm pretty sure it's a 1971 or 1972.


The Japanese (not to mention the Pinto and the Vega) were starting to squeeze the Beetle in the marketplace by the early 1970s, but the price tag on these cars was still quite appealing for penny-pinchers. In 1971, you'd pay just $1,845 for a new (non-Super) Beetle, which was 74 bucks cheaper than a new Pinto. However, the Pinto's OHC engine made a mighty 100 horsepower, while the Beetle's lawnmower boxer engine wheezed out a mere 60 horses. Tough choice?

I'd had a couple of old-style Beetles prior to getting my first Super Beetles, and the switch from the old torsion-beam front suspension to McPherson strut suspension (this being the primary difference between the Super Beetle and the regular kind) didn't feel all that meaningful while driving. However, the new front suspension made room for lots more storage space under the hood. I'm not 100% sure of the year of this car; it's older than 1973, because the windshield is flat, but I'm not enough of an expert to tell the difference between a '71 and a '72. Maybe some of you can!


The regular Beetle sold for $1,845 new in 1972, while the Super went for $1,985. This was seriously cheap; the $1,798 Toyota Corolla, the $1,992 Fiat 128, the $1,960 Ford Pinto, the $2,017 Plymouth Cricket, the $2,060 Chevy Vega, the $1,828 Opel Kadett, the $2,040 Subaru 1300, and the $1,999 AMC Gremlin were all in about the same price range. Which would you have bought, had you been a car shopper on a very tight budget back then?

I haven't been able to get my greasy mitts on many of these cars, so I can't claim any great depth of E-Type knowledge. However, I'm going to guess this is a '66 model (based on the dash and taillights) and hope that I'm pretty close. Jaguar experts, feel free to weigh in on this burning question.


This car sold new for $5,580, which was about a thousand bucks more than a '66 Corvette Stingray coupe with 427 and 4-speed (that info is for those of you who wish to price out the cars in the Jan & Dean song "Dead Man's Curve"). The 427 Corvette was way faster (at least in a straight line) and orders of magnitude more reliable, but just look at this thing (wolf whistle).


But we're not going to have a Corvette-versus-Jag poll today (since we've already had one in Project Car Hell). No, we're going to pick our favorite British car found parked on the non-mean streets of Alameda. Sure, the E-Type is the prettiest... but what about that super-rare MGC-GT? And the '59 Morris Minor takes its owner on a 15-mile commute every day, Lucas Electrics and all!

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Like so many daily-driven beater Beetles, this one got hit and had some replacement body parts installed... then never painted. Why bother when it will just get hit again? That's thinking long-term.


You used to see a lot more Beetles with spacers on the engine lid, to improve cooling. There's no factory temperature gauge or idiot light in these cars, so generally your first warning that terrible overheating is taking place involves frying a valve or piston in the #3 cylinder (the one with airflow blocked by the oil cooler). Remember those big RVEECO external oil coolers?


With 53 rampaging horsepower, the '69 was one of the more powerful Type 1s. You could buy a new '69 Beetle for $1,799. No automobile made in Detroit (or Kenosha) could even come close to that price; a 1969 AMC Rambler listed at $1,998, and the '69 Ford Maverick sold for three bucks less. A new '69 Datsun 510 was a little closer, at $1,896. The King of Cheap in 1969, however, was the Fiat 850 sedan, with a $1,466 price tag. Hey, it's Friday- let's have a DOTS Of The Week poll! Vote for the street-parked Alameda vehicle you liked the best; I'm predicting a Monte Carlo-M6 battle here, but perhaps the Mitsubishi van will get enough weirdness points to take the win.

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Any Peugeot 403 stands on its own as a Hell Project, but what do you get when you restore one? You get 65 horsepower, that's what! Clearly, some added motivation is needed here, and what better choice than the good ol' small-block Chevy? Can you fit one in a 403? Yes, indeed- just ask the guy who's already done most of the work on this 1961 Peugeot 403, which is already set up for Chevy power. Hell, The General himself will sell you a brand-new crate motor today! Then all you'll need to do... hey, hold on- did we say the seller has already done most of the work? Perhaps we were a bit hasty there, but lots of stuff has been done. You get front and rear suspension, a narrowed Ford 9-inch rear, and "tons of parts in the car, more than I can list." In a break from PCH tradition, we've got a seller who appears to know what he's doing in the garage, which means you'll be in for dozens instead of hundreds of sanity-puncturing surprises as you attempt to finish the job.

Small-block Peugeots are fine and all, but all the weight is on the front of the car instead of over the drive wheels. Not good! That's why the real Project Hell Hoon goes for an air-cooled VW, for a virtually weightless car that provides tons of exciting oversteering fun. Like, say, what you'd get with this 1974 Volkswagen Beetle with supercharged 2110cc engine, on sale now with an asking price of $3,500. I've owned a few stupidly overpowered performance-upgraded Beetles, and by some miracle I'm still here to tell you that the handling and braking characteristics of such a vehicle are, uh, interesting. Yes, that's the word I was looking for! So, you've got a car that weighed 1,831 pounds new, hack 400 pounds of unnecessary crap out of it, and then you replace the 46-horsepower 1600 with a howling supercharged unit belting out four or five times as much power (when it's not burning valves or blowing cylinder heads completely off the vehicle, that is). Was the engine built right? What kind of fuel-delivery system (if any) do you get? Is your life insurance paid up?

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So what we have here is your standard mildly hot-rodded late-60s/early-70s Beetle, with exposed engine but retaining the factory wheels and hubcaps.


This could easily be the original engine, or the 15th, and the displacement could be anything from 1200cc all the way up to a stroked "How much money you got?" mill. My guess is that it's a 1500 or 1600 with a few mild performance upgrades.


Ouch! Looks like a mishap involving the right front corner, maybe a Bug-versus-tree or Bug-versus-parked-car episode. But hey, it's still driving!

Alameda was a serious Baja Bug city back in the 70s and 80s; several of my high-school classmates drove them, and I had a Type 3-powered '58 that had been horribly butchered into a cruel parody of a Baja by a previous owner. But now it seems that we're down to just a single example on the whole island (unless there are a few hidden away in garages).


Ah, the old crankshaft degree wheel! And that's the de rigueur Bosch 009 distributor- you can just barely make out the number in the photo.


These things actually do amazingly well off-road... but so do dead-stock Beetles. This one has sacrificed the heater for those dual tailpipes, but the Type 1 heater never worked, anyway.

The old air-cooled Type 1 engine was nearing the end of its long run in North America by the time this car was built; the smog belching from the clattery opposed-four wasn't going to be easy to reduce.


The '72 Beetles got a 60-horse 1600 engine, which did a fairly decent job of moving the car's light weight. This example is a bit battered, but mostly solid and rust-free, which isn't always the case in California; Beetles like to rust so much that they can even find a way to do so in this dry, road-salt-free climate.


The main difference between the regular Beetle and its Super sibling was the front suspension; the Super got coilover struts, while the regular Beetle had the torsion-bar setup of its ancestors.

The '69 Beetle came with a 53-horsepower 1500, close to double the power of the engine in the '59, and a 12-volt electrical system had been standard for a few years by that point.


This Bug is pretty rough, but it reminds us of an era in which beater VWs filled the niche in the Cheap-Ass Old Car ecosystem now occupied by the 80s Toyota Corolla. You can still get these things pretty cheap, but the days of $100 daily-driver-ready Bugs have sputtered off into the sunset.


I've owned a few of these cars, and I really liked them (in spite of the sense I had that they were more like lawnmowers than cars). Any engine you can lift unassisted, with cylinders that come right off, makes engine-upgrade hoonage a walk in the park. Which brings up the question: did any air-cooled VW owners actually adjust their valves when they were supposed to? Or was every single one running badly and cranking out more hydrocarbons than 500 Chrysler Newports? These cars were incredibly good at still functioning while running badly.


Jesus is just all right with me. Jesus, he's my friend. He holds up the speaker wires in this Beetle!

VW didn't put a lot of decoration on these cars, but the Wolfsburg emblem below the trunk release is a real beauty.


You got a 36-horse 1200 in your Beetle for '58 or '59, which was power enough for highway cruising. That doesn't necessarily mean that's what this Beetle has in the back; even if the owner hasn't swapped in some kind of Weber-ized Type 4, after nearly 50 years it's likely that at least a 1600 has found its way into this car.


I've always liked this style of antenna mounting; sure, it looks funny, but busted-off antennas are easy to replace.


The blue tarp in the back indicates that this Beetle isn't exactly watertight during the rainy California winters. Let's hope the floorpan isn't rusty!

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Sometimes I get to talk to the owner when I shoot a DOTS car, and this is one such car. The owner was in the garage, wrenching on his '69 Chevelle, when I broke out the camera.


I really prefer the '66 and older headlight style. Yeah, the newer type has fewer things to go wrong, but so what?


This Beetle isn't show quality, but it's solid and rust-free, it's been lowered just enough to look good, and the engine has been treated to a recent rebuild.


The owner tells me he plans to give this car the Volksrod treatment in the near future.


It's great to see the old yellow-on-black California plates still on the street.


This is the oldest Beetle I see parked on Alameda's streets, though only by a couple years. Stay tuned for more!

Though I've talked to a fair number of friendly DOTS car owners while doing this series, this is the first one who would let me put his photo up on the site (that's him on the left). Check out that garage- not only the Chevelle, but a bunch of old British bikes and vintage bicycles to boot! Alameda has tons of these narrow-opening, semi-basement garages, dating from the 1910s and 1920s; they were great for tall, skinny cars but not so good for anything built after about 1930. Still, you can get a Chevelle into one if you're very, very careful.