THE VOLKSWAGEN CAMPER

CHAPTER 5
THE VOLKSWAGEN
CAMPER
Throughout the first four decades of Transporter
production and beyond, Volkswagen might have
approved a company’s conversion of its Panel van,
Microbus and particularly the Kombi into a camper,
but did not manufacture such vehicles at any of its
factories. The task here then is to take more than a
passing look at the key players in the camper story in
Britain, the USA, and, by default, in Germany. Space
precludes detailed coverage of other conversions,
but where a company is well known, or has played a
significant part in the Volkswagen story, a little more
in the way of linage is offered.
Westfalia
Although the long-established, North-Rhine based,
firm of Westfalia has been generally credited as the
founding father of the motorised camper movement,
there is ample evidence that others in Germany
were thinking along the same lines. For example,
those in Britain who attend Transporter-based
shows cannot have failed to come across the 1951
Kombi, supplied by Volkswagen to a Dresden dealer
minus rear compartment seats and finished in primer.
The dealer immediately despatched it to a local
Karosserie, or coachbuilder, where the vehicle was
expertly converted into a fully kitted-out camper of
some complexity. This camper appears to have been
on the road at least two months, if not more, ahead
of any conversion carried out by Westfalia.
However, thanks to Westfalia’s combination of
one-off conversions produced before 1955, and
what was launched as the Camping Box in 1953
(a clever-designed piece of furniture that could be
easily installed for weekend use and equally quickly
removed again during the working week), the
company became established as the key player very
quickly. From 1955, Westfalia offered full camping
interiors as a matter of course and in a period of two
years had produced 1,000 such conversions. A fully
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TVR – ALL THE CARS
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fledged camper assembly line was opened in 1958,
while shortly afterwards Volkswagen’s first brochure
to feature a camper of any sorts was offered to its
dealers. American purchasers in particular took the
camper to their hearts and even more so when the
second-generation Transporter was launched in the
summer of 1967.
In 1968, Westfalia celebrated production of the
30,000th conversion, 75 per cent of which had been
built for export markets. A year later, production was
further increased, so that 80 conversions were coming
off the production line on a daily basis; while by 1971
an amazing 100,000 campers had been manufactured.
Inevitably the oil crises of the mid-1970s were witness
to a substantial downturn in business, with sales in
the US market dropping by a horrifying 35 per cent
almost overnight. While recovery did come and some
superb Westfalia conversions appeared, particularly in
the era of the third-generation Transporter, the heady
heights of the first years of the 1970s were never
paralleled, just as later Bay and Wedge production
always fell short of the extraordinary figures of the
earlier second-generation Transporter.
Having initially simply referred to its product
as a Camping Box, or in the case of a fully fittedout Transporter of 1956 vintage, as the Westfalia
Deluxe Camping Equipment, from 1958 Westfalia
offered both revised versions with SO designations.
As the following chapter details exactly what an SO
designation involved, it is sufficient here to indicate
that the terminology was designed to identify the
evolving pattern of camper layouts available.
In 1958 a revised version of the Camping Box
was allocated the code SO22. That the name if not
the model designation changed to Camping Mosaik
in 1960 was significant, for from this point it was
possible to purchase all the necessary component
parts to create a fully fledged camper. A further
revision occurred in 1962, but the option continued
to be described in the same way. In the latter months
of 1959, the Deluxe Camping equipment was revised
Ÿ It would seem that
the whole world has gone
Camper crazy, with Splittys,
Bays and Wedges appealing
to a wide cross section of
the community.The German
firm Westfalia was the
first company to produce
camping ‘boxes’, or kits,
and went on to convert
numerous Transporters into
full-blown campers. A great
number were exported to
America where they were
branded as the Campmobile.
The example here is a
Helsinki conversion and
is a late model Bay first
registered in 1976.
THE VOLKSWAGEN CAMPER
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