Look At This Behind The Scenes Peek At How The VW Thing Acapulco Came From The Factory

You know what’s a fun car? The Volkswagen Type 181, which we know as the Thing, and in other, less-down-with-fun-names places, the Safari or Trekker or whatever. And there was a version of the Thing that was the rarest of the Things, one created specifically for two super-fancy resort hotels in Alcapulco, Mexico, where Things were used to ferry The Beautiful People from the airport to the beachfront resorts. The resort-specific Things were only built, in Puebla, Mexico between May to July of 1974, and only 400 were built, in total.

These Things were different from normal VW Things in a few key ways: they often had no doors, they had a special tall luggage cage around the rear luggage well, they were painted in two-tone blue-and-white, and they had bold blue-and-white striped upholstery and a matching high, cabana-like roof.

The overall effect was something like a Fiat Jolly, an open-air, tropical-climate sort of resort car, all about ease and vacations and The Good Life.

What I’ve never before seen but recently stumbled upon (thanks to scans of these original VW factory docs uploaded to The Samba) are these instructions for how to assemble the Acapulco as it comes out of the factory. I didn’t realize these were Some Assembly Required kinds of situations! These are fascinating documents, regardless.

Here’s how the Acapulco Thing comes from the factory:

Look at that! Windshield down, everything wrapped up and packaged quite flat, held together with plastic straps! Those are the first things they tell you to remove, of course:

Then you need to get a pal to help you remove the whole package with the roof an other parts, but if you need to move the car around, VW says it’s okay to do this:

Honestly, it looks pretty cool being driven around like that! The roof package makes a sort of fairing kind of deal. But I guess at any sort of speed it’d all just slide off the back. This next bit is interesting: they want you to remove the door hinges:

But don’t panic! You’re replacing those hinges with what seem to be new ones that incorporate the tubes for the upper roof assembly! What I was calling a luggage cage, they call the Lower Roof Assembly, and they have that stashed on the folded-down rear seats, wrapped in cardboard:

…and of course they show you how to install it, with your 6mm allen head bit.

Socket ratchets really haven’t changed much since 1974, have they?

Now its time to get your pal to help stick the roof in its support tubes:

I guess once you bolt this in place, you can’t fold the windshield back down unless you unbolt everything again. But that makes sense; the windshield is supporting at least some of the weight of that roof.

What’s interesting about the completed car is that I’ve hardly ever seen Alcapulcos with doors. I think I always assumed they shipped without doors? But maybe some people liked the security of doors as they drove from the airport to the resort. I also wonder if this means these resorts had some big piles of Thing doors shoved into the corners of storage sheds?

I mean, if a big resort ran a fleet of, say, 10 of these, that’s 40 doors they’d have to stick somewhere if they weren’t using them?

Maybe they loaned them out as really terrible paddleboards? Who knows? Anyway, I’ve learned a great deal.