The Rare Volkswagen Beetle Super Bugger Is The Slowest, Cutest Way To Go Camping

The Volkswagen Beetle is a car that has lived many lives. People have turned Beetles into drag cars, dune buggies, kit cars, police cars, and even air show support vehicles. Beetles have gotten plenty weird, but one of the strangest configurations is a motorhome. Decades ago, creative builders loved putting camper bodies on the backs of cars, and even the Beetle was a recipient. The Super Bugger is one of those motorhomes, and over 50 years ago it was a kit that allowed Beetle owners to chop up their cars to create a camper.

I’m a huge fan of campers that stand out in a crowd. Most RV manufacturers today make about the same thing and after a while, monochrome rectangles on wheels get boring. As I’ve written about many times in the past, a vintage camper is an excellent way to get an RV that’s brimming with character. This 1968 Volkswagen Beetle Super Bugger on Bring a Trailer is a piece of history and simultaneously a slow and cute way to go camping.

The Volkswagen Beetle ‘Super Bugger’ is part of a line of Beetle-based campers. It started with one company seeking to make motorhomes far cheaper.

Chopping Up Bugs

The history of the Super Bugger appears to be somewhat thin, but some sleuthing has unveiled much of its origin story. This VW-based camper story starts sometime in the 1960s when dreamers and builders were cutting up Beetles to turn them into different things.

Among the people chopping up air-cooled Volkswagens was Doug Allenthorpe. According to the February 2018 issue of Dune Buggies and HotVWs, Allenthorpe was a designer and a draftsman with experience building travel trailers. In the 1960s, he took a VW Beetle, chopped off everything behind the dashboard, and built a wood-framed camper box on top. This new motorhome was called the Lil Bugger. The whole unit weighed about 250 to 300 pounds and other modifications included larger tires, a stiffened structure, and an upgraded suspension. The Beetle underneath still performed largely as designed.

Allenthorpe may have been an experienced camper builder, but he was not a businessman. So, when it came time to sell his idea, he partnered up with a firm. Reportedly, this business relationship was an utter disaster and it resulted in Allenthorpe selling the rights to the design to Robert Q. Riley, owner of Robert Q. Riley Enterprises, LLC. We’ll get back to Riley in a moment.

With the Lil Bugger no longer under his control, Allenthorpe decided not to give up on making an affordable Beetle-based camper. His next iteration would be bigger and better, and this time, Allenthorpe wouldn’t lose the camper to the company that was supposed to market it. The new camper, which made its release in 1975, was called the Super Bugger, and Super Campers of Costa Mesa, California sold it.

Your Super Bugger started life as a Volkswagen Beetle donor car. The camper shell was advertised to fit on any Beetle built between 1961 and 1977 with a 1600 engine and you had a few major options for your build. For the price of $1,950 you got the shell, leaving you to chop up your Beetle to mount it yourself. If you wanted the shell installed onto your existing Beetle, that would cost you $2,995, toss on another $1,000 if you wanted the shell furnished, including seats, shocks, carpets, and curtains. Finally, if you just wanted to buy a turn-key unit, that was $5,995.

As I noted before, the Super Buggy consists of a wooden box with fiberglass batt insulation and metal siding. Inside, standard features included two double beds, a stainless sink, a rear bench, a two-burner stove with hood, a sink pump, swivel bucket seats, a 12-gallon water tank, an icebox, and nylon carpeting. Upgrades to the chassis included body reinforcements, custom wheels, and a stronger suspension.

Super Campers advertised fuel economy of 23 to 25 mpg and that the Super Bugger had better stability than a regular Beetle. [Editor’s Note: I wonder what they mean by this? Maybe all that extra weight just made it feel more, um, planted? – JT] Kit build times were advertised to be as quick as 60 hours.

There’s one more variant of this type of camper out there, and some people confuse it for the Super Bugger. In 1977, Robert Q. Riley wanted to publish kit plans for the Lil Bugger in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. Reportedly, the editor of Mechanix Illustrated didn’t want the magazine’s logo to be applied to a camper with the name Lil Bugger. So, the name was changed to MiniHome and published in the June 1977 issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

The MI MiniHome was similar in design to the Lil Bugger and Super Bugger, including the swivel seats, two beds, and small, but usable kitchen. The MI MiniHome also advertised that the sink and stove were installed on a module on tracks so you can cook inside or outside.

Mechanix Illustrated did not advertise a turn-key version — it was a magazine, after all — but did say you could build your MiniHome for about $1,300 and with 120 hours of labor, not including the cost of the donor car. The MiniHome was pitched as an alternative to spending $8,000 on a camper van in the 1970s.

It’s believed that there were around 1,000 Super Buggers built before Super Campers disappeared. I don’t have production data for the MiniHome, but that camper is still something you can build today. The plans have been modernized using 2D CAD drawings and 3D CAD models. If you have an old Beetle that you’d rather have as a camper, the plans cost $55.

This 1968 Volkswagen Beetle Super Bugger

Now we land back at the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle camper for sale on Bring a Trailer. This one is not a Mechanix Illustrated MiniHome, but a Super Campers Super Bugger.

According to the auction listing, this Beetle wasn’t a turn-key build but was converted by one of the vehicle’s previous owners. Super Campers said in advertising that completed builds could be re-titled as a specially constructed vehicle, but it appears some retained the identification of their donor vehicles.

This camper is period-correct on the outside, featuring corrugated aluminum siding over the wooden camper body. The listing notes that the rear shock mounts are reinforced and there are two giant doors on both sides of the unit. In terms of visibility, the driver gets to look out of flat panes of glass and see behind them using a set of RV mirrors bolted to the camper’s front overhang. Another notable exterior feature is the staggered wheel set up. You get wide 15 inch wheels with 295/50 Cooper Cobra tires in the rear and 14 inch wheels with 185/70 Autopar 4S IV tires up front.

Don’t expect a ton of power to back up those looks. A 1.6-liter air-cooled flat four resides in the rear making about 60 HP and transmitting power to the rear wheels through a four-speed transaxle. That engine is fed by a Weber progressive-style two-barrel carburetor and ignition comes from Edelbrock parts. The top speed of a Super Bugger was advertised to be about 10 mph slower than a regular Beetle, so I would expect 70 mph with a tailwind to be a very good day for this camper.

Look, this is not the RV you buy when you need to get anywhere with any sort of speed. It’s also not a rig you should need to stop fast, either, because the brakes are all drums.

That said, the interior is lovely. All of the previously mentioned equipment is present, including a Trav’ler two-burner propane stove, a hand-pumped sink, and a dinette that turns into a bed. A tube TV is also present for those vintage movie nights.

This RV spent a lot of time in Canada before getting sold for $29,700 by Mecum in Houston last April. Now it’s for sale again at Bring a Trailer. As of writing, bidding is at $5,000 with seven days to go.

The Beetle Super Bugger has a weird name and might be one of the slowest campers on Earth, but it’s a totally adorable ride. I bet camping in one of these is also a ball. Honestly, I’d love to see campers like this again today. I know vans are perfectly fine for this task, but I giggle at the thought of regular passenger cars turned into campers.

(Images: Bring a Trailer Seller, unless otherwise noted.)