Type 2 (T1 Split-Screen / T2 Bay Window)

Ben Pon's Sketch and the Type 1 Platform The Type 2 began with Dutch Volkswagen importer Ben Pon, who visited Wolfsburg to arrange Beetle imports and saw the factory's improvised Plattenwagen, a flat parts-mover built on Beetle running gear with the driver perched over the engine at the rear. That layout could not be road-registered. On 23 April 1947 Pon sketched an enclosed box with the driver moved to the front and a payload of around 690 kg; the drawing is now held by the Rijksmuseum. Volkswagen developed the idea between 1947 and 1949 under the internal designation Type 29. The Type 1 floorpan was found to lack the rigidity required to carry a load-bearing van body, so the production vehicle adopted a unitary body-chassis with the frame rails and outriggers built into the structure. Prototypes were shown in 1949 and series production started on 8 March 1950 at Wolfsburg, transferring to a dedicated Hanover plant in 1956.

Body Codes: What Buyers Are Actually Searching For The Type 2 was sold as a range of bodies rather than trim levels, and those body names still drive the market. The Panel Van (Kastenwagen) was the windowless commercial; the Kombi added side windows and removable bench seats; the Microbus was the fully trimmed passenger bus. Above them sat the Microbus Deluxe, universally called the Samba, introduced in June 1951 with eight skylight windows set into the roof around a full-length folding canvas sunroof, extra brightwork and a full-width dashboard. Counting four side windows per side, the windscreen halves, the cab door glass, the skylights and two curved rear corner windows gives the celebrated 23-window figure. From around August 1963, for the 1964 model year, the rear corner windows were deleted in favour of a single larger rear screen, so every Samba built afterwards is a 21-window. A genuine 23-window is therefore a pre-1964 car by definition, which is the whole reason the configuration commands the largest premium in the air-cooled Volkswagen world. Deluxe buses specified without the roof glass and sunroof are the 15-window and later 13-window cars. Work bodies included the single-cab dropside pickup with its lockable under-bed locker and the six-seat double cab, plus ambulances and Westfalia-trimmed campers.

Split to Bay, 1967 European split-screen production ended after the 1967 model year. Its replacement, the T2 bay window, arrived for the 1968 model year with a one-piece curved windscreen, a body roughly 22.5 cm longer, a sliding side door as standard and a substantially better chassis: the swing axles and hub reduction boxes gave way to a double-jointed independent rear end using constant-velocity joints. The 1.6-litre flat-four became twin-port for 1971, the same year front disc brakes arrived, and larger Type 4 engines followed from 1972 in 1.7-, 1.8- and eventually 2.0-litre form, with Bosch L-Jetronic injection on US cars from 1975. Enthusiasts split the run into the early or 'lowlight' bay to 1971, a one-year 1972 crossover, and the late bay from 1973 with its large Europa bumpers. German production ended in 1979.

Brazil, and the Long Tail Production outlived Germany by decades. Brazilian assembly started on 2 September 1957 and did not stop until 31 December 2013, by which time more than 1.5 million had been built there. Brazil kept the split-screen body in production until 1975, long after Europe had moved on, then built the bay window air-cooled until roughly 2005 and water-cooled thereafter. The end came not from demand but from new Brazilian safety regulation requiring airbags and anti-lock brakes, which the unitary 1950s structure could not economically meet. The final 600 vehicles were sold as a numbered Last Edition. This long tail matters to buyers in two ways: it produced a large supply of later, cheaper, non-German vehicles, and it made donor panels and complete overseas shells readily available to the restoration trade.

Structural corrosion is the dominant issue and the dominant cost, since labour on rails, outriggers, jacking points, sills and floors routinely exceeds the price of the panels. Battery trays and rear corners rot from leaking batteries even on otherwise clean vehicles, and blocked gutter drains take out the roof edges. Mechanically the air-cooled flat-four leaks: oil at the engine-to-gearbox joint points to a failed rear main seal, and wet pushrod tubes mean perished seals. Excessive crankshaft end float, felt as movement at the pulley, signals bearing wear and a rebuild. Blue smoke indicates worn bores and rings; the 1.6 is commonly quoted as needing a rebuild around 60,000 miles. Gearboxes jump out of gear, typically fourth or reverse, and crunch on worn synchromesh. Brakes pull under load from sticking calipers or hoses that have collapsed internally. Two safety items recur: heat exchangers corrode and can feed exhaust fumes into the cabin through the heating system, and old cotton-braided fuel hose perishes and leaks petrol over a hot engine. Early split-screens also demand far more maintenance than later vehicles, with chassis greasing intervals as short as around 1,200 miles.

Treat the structure first and everything else second. This is a unitary vehicle, so the chassis rails, outriggers, jacking points, cross members and heater tubes are the vehicle, and specialist guides name them as the main offenders. Get it on a lift with a torch. Check the floors, particularly where dried window seals have let water into the cab and cargo area, and the inner as well as outer sills; the sill on the cargo-door side is almost always the worse of the two. A line of paint bubbles at the rear corner usually means the battery tray beneath has rotted through. Also check the front valance behind the bumper, the roof gutters and their blocked drain holes, the leading edge of the roof, the panel below the windscreen, wheel arches and door bottoms. Carry a magnet and use it. Be actively suspicious of a very shiny vehicle: specialist buyers' guides advise that an honest, tatty, unrestored bus is often the safer purchase than a cosmetically restored one hiding substandard repairs, and that a restoration without bare-metal photographs from the process is not a documented restoration. On any Samba, verify authenticity through documents and chassis number rather than window count, since a standard Microbus roof can be cut and glazed to Samba specification and the market prices re-creations far below genuine cars. Check the chassis number to establish German versus overseas origin: Brazilian and South African CKD assembly continued after 1967 and those vehicles, sometimes sold as 'Fleetlines', are worth less and frequently mix components from several model years. Confirm the claimed year matches the configuration — 23-window means pre-1964, barndoor means before March 1955, disc brakes and twin-port mean 1971 or later.

Values are led decisively by the split-screen, and within it by the Samba. As of August 2026, classic.com carried a T1 Samba market benchmark of roughly $90,700 with an average sale near $96,000 and a benchmark trend arrow pointing down, on a thin pool of around six live listings; recent results spanned roughly $26,500 for a project to about $159,900 for a strong original. The wider T1 market averaged around $52,900, with a Panel Van benchmark near $31,900. Bay windows are an order cheaper: the T2 market averaged around $22,200, with benchmarks around $18,300 for a single cab, $23,200 for a double cab, $17,200 for a panel van and about $42,000 for a Deluxe Microbus. The clone question shows up directly in the data, because classic.com maintains a separate Samba Re-Creation market for converted Microbuses; as of August 2026 that market held around 21 listings against roughly five genuine Sambas, at an average sale of about $55,200 — a very large discount to genuine-Samba money. Auction ceilings were set in an earlier cycle: Hagerty's Type 2 valuation feature (undated, citing results through 2020) records $302,500 for a modified 1965 21-window Deluxe at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale in 2017, $291,500 for an unmodified restored 1961 23-window at Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach in 2017, and $161,700 for a 1967 double-cab pickup at Scottsdale in 2020. The same source, using its own condition ladder, put a 1951 23-window Samba at $198,000 in #1 concours condition, $111,000 in #2 excellent, $60,600 in #3 good and $39,000 in #4 fair, and noted a 21-window in #2 condition worth about 16 percent less than a 23-window, with a 15-window a further 42 percent below the 21-window.