One Of The Strangest “Costumes” For The VW Beetle Was Also One Of The Most Normal But Was Nicknamed For A Creepy Weirdo

I’ve always said that what Australia was to marsupials, Brazil was to air-cooled Volkswagens. Usually when I say this I’m greeted with either blank stares or angry accusations that I’ve ruined someone’s quinceanera with all my yelling or that I’m standing in someone’s picnic and my left foot is in a bowl of potato salad up to the ankle. Point is, people don’t really understand just how incredibly diverse VW Brazil’s air-cooled offering was in the 1960s and 1970s.

VW Brazil’s designers and engineers had a real knack for re-packaging the basic VW Beetle, which they called them Fusca, because those Portuguese speakers seem to have a different word for everything.

Anyway, I started thinking about this because I stumbled upon this very rough video of a VW Brazil commercial for what was officially known as the VW 1600:

I think what is amazing about this car is that it is, essentially, a VW Beetle wearing a practical, conservative outfit. It’s a three-box, four-door sedan! The body was likely inspired by the EA97 prototype design VW was trying out, but even that car was only a two door, and not a glorious quad-door like this:

I used to think this car was actually a Type 3, with that car’s somewhat more updated chassis, but it seems that the 1600 just used the Type 1 chassis, albeit the slightly widened one used for the Karmann-Ghia.

But that engine is an upright-fan Type 1 engine, and the torsion bar suspension is pure Beetle. It’s a Type 1, no question, and that tall, upright-fan engine precluded the Type 3’s party trick of having luggage compartments at both ends.

Still, that squared-off shape did allow for a pretty roomy trunk up front, at least.

VW didn’t try to hide the humble origins of their more upscale four-door sedan (by the way, 1968 was a big year for four-door VWs, with this car, the Type 4 fastback, and the Type 181/Thing all appearing that year with four doors, the first VWs to sport that many doors since the wartime Kubelwagens) and in fact showed made quite clear the common heritage of the Beetle and the 1600 in their ads:

Sometimes they showed the whole car, like above, where they reminded buyers that the Beetle’s ruggedness and off-roadability were also present in the 1600, and sometimes they got a bit more explicit, with some nudes:

Oh, look at that hot naked chassis action right there! Again, though, we see VW just making it quite clear that they’re taking the same basic chassis of the Fusca everyone knows and loves, but are plopping a body on it that wasn’t designed in the 1930s.

It was a very modern-feeling, if perhaps a bit staid, design, with those rectangular headlamps and clean, crisp bodylines. It was only a few centimeters longer than the Beetle, but the overall body was wider and much roomier thanks to the boxy shape, making it a true, if snug, five-seater.

An updated version with quad round headlamps was available as well, as some people seemed to find the big TV-like headlights a bit odd, I suppose:

The VW 1600 wasn’t a huge seller, but a respectable 25,000 were made, and some even found use on the racing circuit, where perhaps that 100cc engine displacement advantage over the Fuscas of the era was just what was needed to make the car into a real monster on the track.

They did have all of the rear-engine traction advantages of the Beetle, which probably was good for rallying and similar rough-terrain racing, but also helped make for some nice and dramatic press photos:

The car was well-known in Brazil because it ended up getting an unusual nickname: Ze do Caixão, which translates to, roughly, Coffin Joe. The thinking seemed to be that the car had the rectilinear look of a coffin, and the four pallbearer handles of a coffin, so, boom, it gets called a coffin, and then that becomes Coffin Joe, the name of a popular and deeply strange Brazilian horror movie character.

Coffin Joe was created and played by Brazilian actor and director José Mojica Marins, and you can get a bit of a sense about him in this trailer for a documentary about Coffin Joe movies. Be warned, though, it has some gory-goofy horror movie stuff here:

The character of Coffin Joe is somewhat unique among horror movie characters in that he seems to be, well, a jerk. You can say a lot about Frankenstein’s monster or your average vampire, or zombie or wolfman or whatever, but they’re not generally jerks, at least not in the sense of being described like this:

“Coffin Joe is an evil, amoral character who considers himself superior to others and exploits them to suit his purposes. He hates morality and superstition (which he includes religion as) to the point of obsession. His central belief is that (self) imposed superstitious beliefs tend to prevent individual development, inhibit positive social change.

Those who do not accept his central belief are considered to be weak, lack power, and limited in their ability to rationalize objectively. Those who share with him similar beliefs are considered to have power and intelligence above the ‘normal’ person.

The primary theme of the character is his single-minded obsession with the “continuity of the blood”; he wants to sire the “superior” child from the “perfect woman.” His idea of a “perfect woman” is not exactly physical but someone he regards intellectually superior to the Brazilian average, and in this quest he is willing to kill anyone who crosses his path.”

I mean, he sounds like one of your friends in college who discovered atheism and Ayn Rand and became an absolutely insufferable dickhead to talk to for years afterwards. Only maybe Coffin Joe does more disfiguring and murdering.

It all seems a little much for such a rational and reasonable car, just a clever way to re-package Beetle mechanicals into something a little more practical and modern, but, hey, I guess nicknames aren’t really things one can always control, are they?