VW’s air-cooled era ends

SAO PAULO, Brazil – With their unique air-cooled engines sputtering to life, brand-new classic Volkswagen minivans chug off the assembly line after a manufacturing ritual barely changed since hippies turned the boxy vehicle into a counterculture icon.

Instead of heading on long, strange trips across Latin America’s largest country, these minivans go straight to work on the streets of Brazil’s largest cities for deliveries of all kinds, as ambulances, mobile convenience stores and even troop transports for soldiers.

But this Friday, a long chapter in the history of Volkswagen AG ends when the last air-cooled motor will be hoisted into a vehicle that’s seen as a museum piece almost everywhere else across the planet.

VW is being forced to change the minivan’s historic rear-mounted engine because of a new Brazilian emissions law to reduce pollution that goes into effect in 2006. Production will continue next year, but the van known here as the “Kombi” will get a new water-cooled motor and a radiator for the first time.

The switch marks the last hurrah for the simple engine developed in the 1930s by famed German engineer Ferdinand Porsche, his key element of a “Volkswagen,” or “People’s Car” that anyone could afford.

“It’s the end of a very long era,” said Ivan McCutcheon, editor of Britain’s VolksWorld magazine for fans of the vans and now-out-of production VW traditional Beetles. “The VW air-cooled engine has been perhaps the greatest produced engine in numbers the world has seen.”

The move comes three years after Volkswagen’s Mexican division stopped production of the minivan and churned out its last two-door bug sedan with an air-cooled motor. All told, about 6 million of the minivans were built with the air-cooled engine worldwide, adding to the more than 20 million Beetles manufactured.

Volkswagen Brasil says Kombi production is actually expected to increase next year from about 10,000 minivans annually to 12,000, because the new engine can run on either gasoline or pure alcohol – widely used as fuel in Brazil, where it costs about half the price of gas.

The body of the minivan won’t change, however, and Volkswagen’s Sao Paulo factory will churn out Kombis in keeping with tradition, minus the high-tech robots that do most of the work in modern car factories.

The Kombi, by contrast, is made by workers who shove the windows into place by hand, use mallets to tap out imperfections in the vehicle’s body and do a final quality check on the doors by slamming them shut while listening to make sure they sound right.