It’s a bit ironic that the #VWType2pickup didn’t actually arrive when the other Type 2s did in 1949, because the T2 was supposedly inspired by a makeshift flatbed pickup, the Plattenwagen. In fact it took almost four years for the pickup to get built - it didn’t arrive until 1952. It wasn’t long after that Type 2s began to show up in numbers in American roads - the most popular of a slate of foreign trucks that were more user friendly for smaller spaces and urban environs than Detroit fare. Today, rare stateside #Type2 pickups are highly prized, but back then they were just workhorses, which is what the #Plattenwagen was to begin with. All Type 2s owe their origin to Ben Pon’s trip to Wolfsburg in the spring of 1947. Pon, a Dutchman who became the first retailer of Volkswagens outside of Germany, had a huge amount of influence with the factory thanks to his sales efforts. On the factory floor he saw the Plattenwagen, an improvised pickup built on a VW chassis with the cab at the back and the flatbed up front. Workers used them to haul heavy parts around the building. It was a purely functional vehicle, but Pon could see that the light, small VW platform might make for a good commercial vehicle. He reversed the layout of the Plattenwagen and sketched a forward-control, one-box Van on April 23 of that year. He pitched his idea to Major Ivan Hirst, then running the factory, but it would have to wait for factory capacity. When VW boss Heinz Nordhoff came on board in 1948, the project really began. The VW pan was reinforced with a ladder frame and the boxy shape (similar to Citroën’s prewar TUB van) was refined in a wind tunnel. The Van and #Kombi arrived in November, 1949. The #Type2Pickup arrived in August of 1952, by which time the Van and Kombi had been joined by a purely civilian version, the microbus. In the USA, the appeal of these vehicles was most commercial - they were frugal, practical, and durable. It was only later that they became collector’s items. The #T2pickup changed very little up until the first major rework of the T2 in 1967, but after 1964, VW’s commercial pickups and vans began to vanish from the USA thanks to the infamous #ChickenTax. https://www.instagram.com/p/CDCNv0rFUF9/?igshid=yhnnzva865qa
