Sure, the green of that car from the door forward seems to be strangely darker than the green from the B-pillar back, but if one bright light green is good, then two is that much better. Let’s take a look inside the Brasilia, why not?
Oh yeah, now we’re talking. What’s even more incredible about the Brasilia is that this is really just a Beetle chassis (well, the slightly wider Ghia one) and a tall-fan-shroud VW engine, and they still made this twin-cargo-area’d wagon work. It’s so different looking than the Beetle, and it still works. In fact, VW of Brazil seemed to think it worked so well that they did it twice, with the sort-of-Type 3-based Variant II:
People often confuse this for a Brasilia, but it’s actually a little different. It’s a bit bigger, it uses the flat Type 3 engine, which give a good bit more room in the rear cargo area, and it uses MacPherson struts up front for a bigger trunk, too. You know, with modern EV skateboard platforms, there’s no reason some carmaker couldn’t build a really appealing modern EV version of a Brasilia/Variant II. Not every EV needs to be big and luxurious and heavy, you know. A little boxily handsome EV with a frunk and a wagon back and minimal electronic bullshit and maybe a weight under 4,000 pounds? Oh well. Hopefully you enjoyed this Brasilia, and it wasn’t just for me. I also can’t wait for EV makers to actually start getting innovative with the skateboard platform. Right now they’re just trying to grab market share, they’re being predictable. A decade down the line? Things might start getting cool. You know that the whole apparent purpose of an EV is to pack as much bullshit in as possible so that people believe that they’re the Jetsons, not the Jefferson, right? I almost managed to buy one while visiting family in Orlando, but I was about $2,000 shy of the $7K asking price at the time. It’s on the list of “Ones That Got Away” as I should have just borrowed the extra and bought it, especially considering the difficulty of finding any Brasília in the US. I did manage to find a nice die-cast version of one in Petropolis at a “Banca”, one of those street-side stands selling books, newspapers, etc. After striking out at a couple of these places, I found one where the guy first said he didn’t have any, just the ones on display. Then he sort of gave me a look, and asked how many I would buy if he did have others that weren’t on display. I said maybe three or four, depending on what they were. He then asked how I was going to pay: “de credito, o ‘bifufa’ ?” and rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for cash. After I responded “em dinero”, the guy smiled, laughed, and went back to open up what was apparently his secret stash of cool die cast minaturas (I learned not to call them “brincados” – toys). I ended up buying diecast versions of a VW Brasília, a VW Paratí, a Chevy Ipanema, and a Dodge of some sort, all at full retail price and paid for in cash. It seemed we were both quite happy with the transaction and it made a great start to my Brazilian die-cast car collection. I’d been brought up exclusively with a string of Citroen GSs, CXs, a Visa and the 2CV, so I not only hated the Beetle but I knew nothing about it, other than there was a good chance they had put the body on backwards because the engine was at the wrong end. Thanks entirely to you and your excellent work here (and I think somewhere else I forget the name of) I now genuinely admire the vast number of early VWs based on that concept. Nice work Torch. I only had the 2CV because it had been abandoned by my older brother after he crashed it and replaced it with an actual car. I’d love to see a guerilla-honest ad for say an SUV that features one in beige sitting in the Costco parking lot, with the tagline “it’s what you want, now with wider, heated seats.” -CRV/RAV4/Rogue/Etc guerilla-honest ad If you haven’t already, check out Matthew Crawford’s excellent Why We Drive (Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road). He has a section with your sense of humor here, how the EV world is full-on serious about it. My current Mazda is so black inside and out that I think The Rolling Stones wrote a song about it. It was a better deal than than the other more colorful cars I looked at though, so I went full cheap bastard and kept the extra green in my bank account. The Kona N only comes in black, bright red, white, and a dumbed down gray-blue that doesn’t hold a candle to the performance blue the EN and VN come in. I went with black because it tones down the louder aspects of the design…which is also a good move in the Elantra N, which has a face only a mother could love. It looks better in person than it does in photos but it’s still uhhh….not great. I may wrap it in the next year and am open to suggestions…but seeing as I’m dropping a chunk of change on all season performance tires for it later today, I’d rather not have two significant car related expenses back to back considering I just bought it in June.
