It's been boxing so beautifully for 130 years...
The sound of a VW Käfer’s engine is as unmistakable as the three great anthems of travel that George Bailey evokes in *It’s a Wonderful Life*: the clatter of an anchor chain, the roar of an airplane engine, and the whistle of a steam locomotive. Some describe the boxer engine’s sound as a whir, a babble, or a jingle. And especially when pulling away, as the engine revs up, it chatters in an almost endearing way.
Air cooling, rear-mounted engine, boxer—that sounds “old school.” Water cooling, front-mounted engine, and inline configuration are the standard setups today. But Carl Benz couldn’t have known that 130 years ago when he developed his so-called “Contra” engine, in which the pistons face each other. And so, with the exception of the Beetle, the boxer engine remained a specialty that we find today almost exclusively in Porsche and Subaru vehicles.
A technical refinement that 99 percent of all customers probably neither know about nor care about. And electric cars are ensuring this collective amnesia anyway. So we’ll proudly showcase this piece of our cultural heritage and, on our next drive, happily demonstrate just how beautiful an engine can sound without coming across as vulgar or obtrusive. And the thumbs-up from onlookers prove us right, even if we’re not rolling up in a classic VW Käfer but in a rare VW Type 3 1600 TL…
