The Thing - A Car for the 1970s

The Volkswagon Beetle was the emblematic vehicle of the 1960s counter-culture: cheap, well-designed, and poke in Detroit’s eye. By the 1970s, Volkswagon was ready to roll out a follow-up vehicle that would capitalize on the burgeoning off-road/dune buggy market. It would be rugged and modular, and easy to customize, a realization of an anti-consumerist ethos that valued function over form. The ad copy read: “At last, the car that can be anything.”

The result was the Thing – featured here as a prize on ‘The Price Is Right’:

The Thing looked the part with its stamped metal body panels, and it did have some neat design features- for example, the doors actually came off, and could be swapped front to back. However, as with so much in the 1970s, what should have been a good idea didn’t pan out in the real world, and the Thing’s lifespan was short.

What were the problems? For starters, the Thing may have been the ideal vehicle for your hip pot-smoking college kid, but it was priced at a full $1,000 above its near-relative the Beetle. Another drawback was that the Thing was apparently a harsh and drafty ride – one would think that it had been designed for military service, rather than for civilian comfort and fun.* But what really put the fork in was safety. In 1975, a mere two years after the Thing debuted, new U.S. vehicle safety standards were put into effect. The Thing may have been designed to be many things, but safe wasn’t one of them, and it had to be pulled from the market.

But in its brief butterfly life, the Thing seemed to be a realization of the 1970s' promise of a brave new earth-toned world. Here is an advertisement that describes the concept - before the safety standards killed the dream:

*History footnote: What was most certainly not stressed in Volkswagon’s advertising for the Thing was just where its design originated. Much like the Beetle, the Thing came to be during the Nazi era; unlike the Beetle the Thing was actually designed as a military vehicle. Just as the US Army produced the Jeep, in the war years the Wehrmacht designed a serviceable lightweight off-road vehicle, known as the Kübelwagen (Bucketwagon), which ended up seeing a lot of service in North Africa. Unlike the Jeep, which went into civilian production immediately after the war, the Kübelwagen design was not revived until the 1960s. By then, continental memories of the late unpleasantness had faded somewhat, and the Thing came about as the result of a pan-European project to produce the ‘Euro-jeep’.

Here is the original version of the Thing, fulfilling its original purpose: