This Bonkers VW Beetle May Have Been The First Ever With A Chevy V8, And Its Whole Body Has Been Split Open Like A Clam UPDATED

Sometimes my mail carrier delivers things a bit late, which could explain why my April 12, 1958 issue of Das Auto Motor und Sport only just arrived the other day. “Holy crap,” I exclaimed upon looking at the cover, “the new ’58 Dauphine is here!” Excited that perhaps I could be the first American journalist to review the ’58 model, I did a quick Google search and found that I’d been scooped by a frustratingly meager 65 years. “Shit snacks!” I screamed, flinging the magazine at one of the many taxidermied weasels that filled the curio cases lining the wall of my conservatory. The magazine caused one of the weasels to ricochet back at my face, where it caught me, hard on the bridge of my nose. I went down, blinded by pain, and the last thing I heard was a colossal whudd when I impacted the floor.

I must have been out for a while, because I was awoken by the impact of my Roomba against my head, and then fully awoke when a chunk of hair was spiral-wound into the Roomba’s brushes. As I frantically tried to disengage the whining Roomba from my hair, my eye alighted on the Motor und Sport magazine cover, which boldly stated “VW mit V8-Motor!” Huh, I thought, a V8 swapped Beetle in 1958? That’s pretty incredible! Then I finally yanked the Roomba off my head, taking with it a sizable chunk of hair and a bit of scalp, then stumbled backwards through a pair of glass sliding doors and tumbled painfully down a wrought-iron spiral staircase, landing in the warm muck of my compost drum.

People have been swapping engines of all sorts into Volkswagen Beetles for a hell of a long time; the most famous example of this is undoubtedly Paul Newman’s 1963 red Beetle convertible with a 351 cubic inch Ford V8 mounted where the rear seats used to live and driving the rear wheels via a five-speed ZF transmission from a (likely) Ford GT40.

Newman wanted to create the ultimate sleeper, and he was pretty damn successful. This Beetle was completed around the mid-to-late 1960s, and though it’s by far the best known V8-swapped Beetle, it likely wasn’t the first. as both Beetles and V8s were quite common in America about this time. I think the one referenced in Motor und Sport has a decent chance of being the first, because it had to have been build sometime well before April of 1958, and while Volkswagen was gaining quite a foothold in America (VW sold over 64,000 cars in America in 1957), they weren’t the wildly ubiquitous things they’d become throughout the 1960s.

The article only shows one picture of the V8-swapped Beetle in question, and it gives a few clues as to what year the original car was:

The oval window tells us that this is a pre-1958 car, and the bumper overriders mean it has to be a 1956 or 1957 car. A ’56 or ’57 Beetle would have come with an 1192cc 36 horsepower engine, which means that the 4.7-liter/286 cubic inch Corvette engine that replaced the little air-cooled flat-four has almost five times the displacement and, at 283 hp, nearly eight times the power as the original equipment. The first lines of the story explain what is going on:

One likes to dream of the inconspicuous car with the enormous performance. Normally, however, the ambition of the VW driver does not go further than the dual carburettor system or the Porsche engine. What an American set up with his VW, as described here, seems quite improbable: he installed a 4.7 liter Chevrolet Corvette engine. With our statements about the remarkable technical details we rely on the American time SPORTS CARS ILLUSTRATED, the report of which we freely reproduce.

What I find strange is that no name is actually given for the builder, who is just referred to as the “owner.” I also have not been able to find the issue of Sports Cars Illustrated where they reproduced the story from, but I have been looking through their archives online.

I was curious about how the engine cooling would be handled for something like this, and the diagram does show that pretty well, at least. The Corvette engine is mid-mounted, and looking at the diagram, it seems that cooling air for the rear-mounted radiator is sucked in from underneath the car and sent to the fully ducted radiator via a pair of blowers on either side of the engine, right behind each of the front seats. The air seems to go through fat pipes on either side of the engine and then through the radiator, presumably to be exhausted out the VW’s old air intake louvers under the rear window.

Of course, the most striking thing about the build visually has to be the clamshell design that allows the whole rear half of the car to flip open. The article gives a few details of how this was done:

In order to increase the size of the resulting large “bonnet”, the normal hood was welded shut and the underside reinforced with thin steel tubing. Two old Ford connecting rods were welded to the rear cross-member of the new frame and act as hinges for the new hood, which in turn is held in place by two latches, accessible from the front but invisible from the outside. The engine is a standard Chevrolet Corvette engine with fuel injection. The output is 283 SAE hp with a displacement of 4.7 litres. The only non-standard parts are the hydraulic throttle control cylinder and purpose-built exhaust manifolds. The clutch is also from the Corvette; it is operated hydraulically by a Chevrolet master cylinder installed alongside the VW brake cylinder. The last part of the Corvette three-speed gearbox housing was cut off and replaced with a steel plate. The main shaft was shortened and modified to accommodate a Ford cardan joint. The Halibrand differential was bolted to the tubular frame behind the gearbox.

I think when they say “normal hood” they mean the engine lid, not the front hood for the trunk and fuel tank, and it appears the bodywork was reinforced with tubing, and connecting rods (!) were used for hinges. Wow. This setup reminds me an awful lot of the remarkable flat-eight air-cooled 3.2-liter Beetle built by the Brazilian racing brothers Fittipaldi, which used a pair of 1.6-liter VW engines bolted together, and the body was designed to swing open in much the same way as the unnamed Beetlevette builder above. Here’s the Fittipaldi 3200 VW Bimotor:

As you can see, the basic idea is pretty much the same. The Fittipalidi Beetle used a fiberglass body and was built in 1969 – over a decade after our mystery V8 Beetle. Plus, this was a purpose-built racing machine, and the V8 Beetle seems to have been just somebody’s bonkers toy.

What I would love to know is if this is, in fact, the first time that anyone had shoehorned a V8 into a Beetle. I feel pretty confident in saying it likely is. The place is right – if this would have happened anywhere there were Beetles, it would have to be America, with its vast stretches of roads and plentiful V8 engines. Maybe Australia, which got Beetles just a bit after America did, in 1953, though they were actually built from CKD kits Down Under instead of just being imported, as they were in the U.S.

Still, I think America is the most likely place for this to have first happened, and, if this did happen in 1956 or 1957, that seems like about the right time. Beetles were still relatively new in America, starting with two being brought over in 1949, and only selling 1139 in 1953. By 1955, they were selling over 32,000 a year, going up to over 50,000 by 1957, which means that’s just about the first time that Beetles would have been getting common enough in America for someone to likely think of a crazy idea like this.

I wish I had more information on who did this build, and where and why and what happened to the car. I presume that, weighing likely well under 2000 pounds and probably driving on crossply tires with nearly 300 hp on tap, the thing likely got launched into an ocean or something like that. But I feel like even if this one isn’t precisely the first swap of its kind, it’s likely a very early example of what would become a staple of American car culture: jamming Chevy V8s into small things to make trouble and speed.

Look at the kilograms per horsepower rating there: 3.3 kilograms (about 7.3 pounds) per horsepower, which puts this overachieving Beetle in the same class as a W12 Bentley Continental GT, actually better, even, since the 626 hp Bentley gets rated between 7.9 pounds/hp and about 9 pounds/hp. That’s pretty amazing, especially for 1957.

There’s also one other remarkable detail mentioned in the story that makes me really, really want to see a photograph:

Finally, a scoop: so that the machine cannot see through the windows, it is covered with a fiberglass plate which gives the impression from the outside that the rear seats are full of luggage, suitcases, you can see a shoe box there: convincing. And in order to disperse the last one, the owner of the VW-V8 bought another VW that looks the same but is normal, and he and his children take a leisurely stroll in the back on Sunday afternoons.

Wait, what? There’s some sort of fake interior printed on a fiberglass panel, so that if you look through the windows, it looks like the back half of the car is just full of random luggage? That’s astounding! Where are the pictures of this thing?

My curiosity is very energized here, so I’m going to keep looking around, and hopefully can do a follow-up story. As always, if anyone has any clues or ideas, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Until then, we can just all enjoy knowing that one of the earliest wildly-hot-rodded Beetles may be older than anyone guessed, and had an engine camouflaged under a picture of suitcases and shoeboxes.

UPDATE: Thanks to the super-sleuthing of commenter RaKr, the original article has been found, in the January ’58 Sports Car Illustrated. How did I miss this? The dirty truth about this business is sometimes you just want to get something up and published. But, happily, this isn’t print, and I can update, like now, showing you the story by autojourno legend Bob Cumberford called Violent VW:

The original story also includes two important pics: a photo of the incredibly stealthy car, and a drawing of the molded fiberglass fake luggage in the rear, which is so clever and fun I just want to spit:

Another fascinating tidbit that shows the level of commitment to stealth from the anonymous builder: he has an identical stock VW that he drives around with his kids in the back seat just to keep everyone nice and confused. Wow.

Also, now that I can read the original article in my native tongue, the tone feels like this is all new and novel, and makes me think it likely is the first V8-into-Beetle swap. Amazing!

This May Be The Strangest MG Ever Built Because Of What’s Hidden Underneath

It’s Time To Address A VW Beetle Horsepower Mystery That’s Been Bothering Me For Decades

Here’s The Story Behind VW’s 1960s Beetle Re-Design And Why It Never Happened