I can’t recall exactly how this came up recently, but I was talking to David about my first real high-school girlfriend, the girl I first actually had sex with (I know it had to have happened on a Monday afternoon, because I went to a Boy Scout meeting that night for a really potent shot of incongruity) and I remember telling him how every time I picked her up to take her out for a date, I had to turn off my car and coast. Because her mom was an anti-Semite who didn’t want her daughter dating Jews. I had just kind of accepted this for decades without thinking about how that sentence sounded to people, but David’s reaction reminded me that, oh yeah, that’s all pretty weird. And, I also realized that most of that sentence could use a lot more clarification. I can’t do much to answer the why of the anti-semitism, but I think I can make a decent stab at the turning-off-the-car part, so let’s dig in to this little nugget from my adolescence.
Her name was Jennifer, like I think every girl in the 1980s was named, and she was an adorable blonde girl with big brown eyes, and I was delighted and a bit amazed she was interested in me. This was around, oh, probably 1987 or so? Something like that. We went to high school together and while I can’t recall exactly how we first met, it turned into A Thing fairly quickly, and, to Jennifer’s credit, she mentioned quite early on that her mom had a strict no-Jews rule for her daughter socially. As a reasonably healthy and clinically horny 16 year-old kid, I really didn’t care what restrictive social religious preferences her mother wanted to impose on her daughter, so I was undeterred.
Plus, why the fuck would I want to make an anti-Semite happy? Tough shit, lady. Your daughter has the Shtetl Fever. Deal with it.
[Editor’s note: Two things: First, this is a sad story in many ways, and a real shame to have happened to young Torch. Second: There are certain, uh, personal things in this story that I’d never discuss in public, but Jason is a bit “open” so I guess I’m just going to let him do his weird thing. For those of you offput by any of this, no worry — there’s a technical story on how suspensions work right there on the front page. -DT]
Jennifer didn’t give a shit either, but she had to live with her mom, so we couldn’t be openly defiant. This meant her mom couldn’t know when we went out, which meant some amount of subterfuge was required. Sometimes it got quite elaborate, like when we had school dances; I’d have to get a friend of mine to go to her house to pick her up, and then meet me at another location to do the handoff.
I remember having my tall, good-looking Prussian/Aryan-descended friend Charles dress up in a suit once to get her for some formal dance. His pictures are now in that family’s photo album somewhere, a memorial to all the good works beards (stand-ins/decoys) have done for humanity. She was in a shiny red dress and had her hair pulled back, and Charles teased me by saying she looked like a Russian prostitute, like that was a bad thing.
Anyway, beards were only for occasional use; by far the vast majority of the time the precautions taken were far simpler. Jennifer lived on a corner, at the top of a hill, so as I’d crest the hill to pick her up, I’d turn the car off, coast to the corner, turn, then stop on the hilly side street. Jennifer would come out of the house, round the corner, get in my car, and we’d coast down to the base of the hill, where I could safely turn the car back on. Luckily, this was all downhill.
Now, she told her mom she was going out with friends, who would be picking her up in a car, so why was it necessary for me to coast in if her mom wasn’t looking out the window like a hawk, which she wasn’t? Well, the key is in that picture up there: I drove a Volkswagen Beetle.
Unlike nearly every other car on the road, almost anyone can identify an old, air-cooled Beetle by sound alone. If I was like my friends and drove a K-Car or a Buick Century or a Ford Maverick or a Toyota Tercel or whatever, I wouldn’t have had to do this. But, I wasn’t like my friends. Where they got hand-me-down parent cars, I had a very specific desire for a Beetle, so I saved up and bought one when I was 15, before I could even drive.
That first Beetle was a ’68, but was soon crashed (not my fault; dude didn’t yield, though my dad drove by the accident and yelled JJJJAAAASOOOOONNNN like it was my fault, anyway) and then I pulled the engine from that and bought a ’71 Super Beetle from a friend’s sister who neglected to put oil in the engine. Ever. So, I had a ’71 Super with a ’68 engine, making it a rare case where an engine swap gives you less power: the ’68 was a single-port 1500cc engine making 53 horsepower, and the stock ’71 engine was a 1600cc dual-port making a ravenous 60 hp, so I lost seven horses in that deal. Oh well.
[Editor’s note: JT I feel like you’re getting into the weeds a bit here. Carry on. -DT]
Okay okay David. So all of this is to say that the reason I had to undertake this ridiculous clandestine coast-and-grab maneuver over and over is that I chose to drive one of the loudest, most distinctive-sounding cars on 1980s American roads, and if my date’s mom heard that distinctive VW clatter, she’d know immediately that that’s the car of that little Jew I specifically told to keep away from my daughter (because she knew who I was and what I drove).
This all brings us to the question I really want to investigate today: Why does an old air-cooled VW sound the way it does?
While there are many easy answers–it’s loud because it’s air-cooled, and so on–those don’t quite cover it. Sure, that’s a factor, but the unique sound of the VW Type I engine is really a mix of several key factors. Four main factors, I think, and if you’re not doing anything better, I’d like to break them down for you now!
Factor One: Air-Cooling
The fact that a VW flat-four is air-cooled is probably a factor. Air-cooled engines lack the cooling water jacket around the cylinders, which are instead separate, bolt-on “jugs” with finned exteriors. The lack of that sound-deadening water jacket means air-cooled motors tend to be louder if you believe the British classic car insurance company Footmanjames. This isn’t all of the equation, of course, but it’s a big factor, especially for explaining the sheer volume of Beetle engines, which are, of course, loud.
Then there’s the way the engine is cooled – by sucking in a lot of air with a big, hamster-wheel-type fan, set into a large, ducted fan shroud. The noise of rushing air into the fan that then resonates through the thin-metal fan shroud makes up a big part of the background layer of a Beetle’s engine sound.
Factor Two: Body And Engine Layout Quirks
Okay, so we have an already loud engine, and of course Volkswagen was aware of this, so the company took some steps to keep things quiet. But not many steps. Really, the Wolfsburg-based company only cared about keeping the noise down on the inside of the car, so all of the sound deadening is on the firewall at the front of the engine compartment, while there’s none at the rear, on the engine lid.
The engine lid is just a stamped steel shield-shaped body panel. Beetles made between 1970 and 1971 had two sets of louvers on the engine lid, increasing to four sets in 1972. These louvers are just simple holes into the engine bay, with no baffles or anything to impede sounds (though convertibles sometimes had a rain shield). So, from the outside of the car, plenty of sound escapes, and if you’re standing next to a running Beetle, you can likely hear if the alternator/fan belt is loose just from the slapping sounds the belt makes.
Then there’s the fact that, because it’s a horizontally-opposed engine set low in the rear, the cylinder heads on either side are actually just exposed to the world. They’re under the fenders, sure, but you can see them if you squat down and look past the rear tire, and that also means all of the valve chatter and noise you can hear really well outside the car, since you’re just a valve cover away from those valves. And, the pushrods to actuate the valves are on the bottom of the engine, in little metal tubes, and I’m pretty sure you can hear them doing their thing, too.
I think these factors give a lot of the clattery texture of the Beetle’s sound.
Factor Three: The Exhaust System
The exhaust system is a huge part of why Beetles sound the way they do, and forms the fundamental aural rhythm of the car. I had a stock exhaust setup on my ’71, so that’s what I’m going to explore here; aftermarket setups can change the sound significantly.
The most interesting thing, I think, has to do with the muffler design. VW’s engineers had the goal of making equal-length exhaust header pipes for each cylinder, so that means the cylinders to the front of the engine (3 and 1, towards the front of the car) get their exhaust gases to the muffler via J-shaped tubes (usually inside the heat exchanger units that provide cabin heat) while the two rearmost cylinders, 2 and 4 are much closer to the perpendicular muffler, so they have header tubes inside the muffler that criss-cross on the inside.
So, that means that on the two-exhaust-pipe muffler, cylinders three and two exit closest to the left tail pipe (if you’re facing the rear of the car) and cylinders four and one exit the right one. The cylinder firing order of the Beetle is 1-4-3-2, so that means there’s a pattern that goes RRLLRRLL with two pulses on each side, as opposed to a maybe more expected and even RLRLRL type of pattern.
This double-pulse per each pipe gives the Beetle its distinctive putt-putt rhythm.
Factor Four: Exhaust Tips
So this seems like a tiny detail, but it’s really one of the most important parts of the distinctive Beetle sound. It’s all about those little “pea-shooter” stock exhaust tips, about the size and shape of a 10x enlarged chrome cigarette. Inside these exhaust tips is a perforated metal sleeve, with a slight gap between the perforated inner cylinder and the outer chrome cylindrical shell.
Something about this setup gives the VW’s exhaust pulses an extremely noticeable whistle/chirp note, a sound that’s sharp and cuts through not just the rest of the Type I’s cacophony, but almost everything else on the road, and I think this sonic element is why Beetles can be heard and ID’d from so far away. This video (which features a ’71 Super Beetle, just like my old one!) gives a great example of the sound:
If you want to hear how it sounds without the stock pea-shooter tips, you can hear it in that same video right here, when they run the car without the tips on, which is why this video is so ideal to illustrate this. Without the tips, a lot of the other sound elements are there, but that distinctive whistle is missing, and you can hear just how crucial it is.
All these factors are important, though; while those tips are maybe the most obvious factor, if you popped them on the end of a Honda Civic’s muffler, you still wouldn’t be able to sneak up on anyone expecting a Beetle. However, that said, I wonder if I had changed exhaust tips if that would have been enough to fool Jennifer’s mom? I was too stupid to think of it back then, so I guess I’ll never know.
If I’m honest, part of me kind of liked the cloak-and-dagger quality of it all. And, when it came time, as it almost always does in teenage high school relationships, to break up, I thought if I told Jennifer that I didn’t want to lie to her mom anymore, it would be a cleaner, kinder way to do it.
It was not. At all.
Her mom did tell me that, no, I can’t see her daughter, but that was hardly the easy out I thought it might be, because, of course, I was an idiot. So, it didn’t really end that well, but, you know, I was 16.
Now I can look back on all of this with amusement, and while I have no idea where Jennifer or her mom are today, I can at least take some comfort in knowing that an anti-Semite’s daughter and I did all kinds of depraved things in the back of a loud VW Beetle, which I’m certain her mom would have been livid to know about. So that feels good.
Plus, it forced me to really understand why Beetles are so loud! That plus being defiant to a bigot feels pretty win-win to me.
Maybe if you had let her know you were driving a car designed by Hitler she’d be more understanding of your relationship? Not that that should be a goal, mind you. She sounds awful.
“I have no idea where Jennifer or her mom are today”
Most likely attending MAGA rallies.
Well, mom is. Maybe Jennifer found a nice Jewish boy with a Chevette.
I love this article so much. I just bought a 1973 Super Beetle with 29K miles, orange, so clean. If you have plans to come to metro detroit soon, I would love to show you my new bug. I love the noise it makes, so many people waving and smiling. Now my Polestar 2 is just getting dust in the garage lol
When you think about it, this and probably a lot of other stories to come from Torch and David could just end “The Autopian!” interchangeably with “the Aristocrats!”
“my dad drove by the accident and yelled JJJJAAAASOOOOONNNN like it was my fault”
Gonna need to hear a little more about this.
Yo Jason. Some noobs are walking onto you turf.
https://www.carbibles.com/why-do-car-designers-like-hiding-turn-signals-and-brake-lights/?utm_campaign=trueanthem_AI&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_term=carbibles&
Ich bin Hans und stimme voll und ganz zu.
I know you’ve written that the Beetle wasn’t the Hitlermobile some have made it out to be. But… you’ve gotta admit the fact that the offending sound coming from the Jew’s car was emitted by a VW is at least a *little* ironic, no?
What’s good about this story is the great car details. What’s bad is the lack of sex details. Seriously, what kind of website are y’all running here?
Fantastic piece of work. Thanks to everyone there. I’m going to enjoy checking in, a lot.
Great story.
Am I the only one that notices hints of the bubbly sounds of the air cooled VWs in Subarus modified with, uh, less restrictive exhaust?
The 2CV’s flat twin is another very distinctive air-cooled engine sound. It’s interesting that the most unique engine noise comes from the most ubiquitous cars. Also, it’s crazy how long accepted anti-semitism was around for. When we moved to Connecticut in 1985, my father had to find the country club that allowed Jewish members. No joke.
That’s funny, I dated a Jewish girl whose mother didn’t like me because I was a gentile… or maybe it was the long hair and the fact that I reeked of pot
Anyway, my favorite part of the Beetle engine is the exhaust part that sounds like a chirping bird, it makes Beetles sound so happy 🙂
I have wondered about she source of that “chirp” since the mid-70s when I commuted to a job with a woman who drove a 73′ Super Beetle.
I wish I had done any depraved thing with a girl in high school. Maybe I just needed the magic VW…
I gotta ask – is this the story that Jalopnik wouldn’t allow? Because if so, they missed out.
Nope!
Great read Torch– hilarious, heartbreaking, and informative. My favorite image was of you sitting in a Boy Scouts meeting post-coitus. It must have been murder learning how to tie a clove hitch or whatever that day’s task was after such a momentous event.
You need to add a “Jennifer” tag, as I’m sure there are at least a couple of more Jennifer stories on the way.
In SoCal, we called the OE-style Bug exhausts “peepster pipes”. It’s a sound I will take to the next life.
And one morning we woke up to find that someone had spelled out JEWS in bleach on our front lawn. Orange County, ca, 1968, because my parents dared to put up a campaign sign for Humphrey. Tie-in: my dad’s ’63 Bug was in the driveway at the time. WITH peepsters.
I hate most people now.
So good and even informative. You guys are doing some great stuff. Keep em coming.
So many good lines in this one. Can’t even pick one.
My repeated viewings of Mallrats during college have convinced me that the backseat of a Volkswagen is a very uncomfortable place to have sex. Torch can you confirm or refute?
Not that any of us would have complained at the age of 16.
Can confirm that the backseat of a Bug is a perfectly acceptable place for sex, at least when you’re 16. Plus, a testosterone-infused 16-year-old doesn’t even think about that.
It CAN be done: I’m here. The only privacy my parents ( in Nebraska during November ) could find was in a ‘64 Beetle, so it had to have happened. I, personally, gave up on illicit activities in the back of a ‘74 Super Beetle some 19 years later. My gf suggested we just remove the back seat and use that on the ground. That worked. I’ll leave it there—except to note that Doritos are NOT an acceptable substitute for actual food when a slender young lady who skipped breakfast has been drinking pink champagne. Quite a memorable 18th birthday it was.
Pretty nice weeds you have there, Torch.
The muffler and decklid definitely have more to do with the characteristic Beetle sound – especially the whistle / rattle. The Type III which used air intakes through the rear fenders, a fan shroud mounted to the back of the motor with a fan bolted directly to the crank, and a more standard single side-exit muffler had near zero whistle compared to a Type I (if anything they had a bit more of the 914 sound).
For a minute I thought I heard John Hughes’ corpse trying to claw its way out of the grave about this but the sound was drowned out by a VW engine.
This…this is a perfect car website article. I may be a tad biased because I have a 74 super beetle, so I was automatically interested, but learning a bit more about Torch was a bonus. Keep em coming, boys.
Those old Beetles make great EV conversions. They’d also be easy to aeromod. Especially the early ones without the widened fender flares(started by the Superbeetle).
If you still have any old Beetles, consider this as a possibility or a template for one with your own twist.
A properly designed rear spoiler could help the rear of the car act as a partial kammtail, and given all of the turbulence at the back of the stock car, cut drag by 15% or more by itself and improve high speed stability. Underbody panels covering the underside from front to rear with the bare minimum spaces to clear the wheels/suspension could easily/likely get another 10% reduction over the stock Beetle. Another significant reduction could be had with the cumulative effort of a rounded front air dam, underside rear diffuser, ground clearance lowered to about 4.5″, rear wheel skirts, passenger mirror delete, curved airshield over the windshield wiper area, wheel spats, and shaved rain gutters. I think the potential for a hobbyist without wind tunnel access to cut a stock early VW Beetle’s total air drag by about 40% exists.
Doing so would cut the drag coefficient from 0.48 to about 0.27, assuming a slightly increased frontal area from the front air dam and wheel spats, from 1.8 m^2 to 1.9 m^2.
This would mean you could use a single Netgain HyperDrive 9″ motor, which would require a modest sized battery pack to max it’s in-spec output to 130 horsepower peak, 100 horsepower continuous, 168 lb-ft of torque peak, and with optimized gearing, it would be enough power to max out at about 140 mph using peak power and risking exceeding the motor/controller limits if the speed is held too long, or max out at 128 mph and never exceed the continuous load. It would take some gearing changes over the stock VW Beetle transmission. Assuming the completed conversion weighed in at 2,200 lbs, 0-60 mph would be in about 6 seconds, rowing through the gears.
Using a 25 kWh pack of Tesla Model 3 modules would be around 500 lbs, you’d likely be able to get a real-world non-hypermiling 120 miles range @ 70 mph and 160 miles @ a more efficiency-friendly 55 mph on the highway without exceeding the GVWR of the car with a driver and passenger. And make enough power from the battery to max out the power output of the motor/controller combo. And the Model 3 battery modules are so dense you could balance the weight of the car to however you saw fit.
Plus it would be rear wheel drive and a crap ton of fun if set up properly.
It should also be mentioned, that the Beetle chassis would make a good platform for a Volkhart V2 Sagitta replica. THAT Beetle-like minicar had a drag coefficient of only 0.17, and could reach 93 mph on a stock 24 horsepower 1.1L early VW Beetle engine. A fiberglass body of such would probably lose about 300 lbs over the stock Beetle if made in fiberglass, with an added CroMo roll cage for safety. A Hyper 9HV system with a 25 kWh pack of Tesla Model 3 batteries, if you got the aero of the Sagitta replicated, would likely yield 180 miles range @ 70 mph and a max continuous speed of 155 mph with optimized gearing, and 0-60 mph would be ~5 seconds shifting through the gears. And it would still be rear-engined, rear drive.
It’s a shame the Sagitta never became mass-produced. It’s about as ideal of an EV conversion body form as one could get. But the Beetle is about the next best thing, and it’s actually available and lends itself to being modified accordingly.
A Sagitta kit car for the Beetle wouldn’t even need to look exactly like a Sagitta. It could be sexxed-up with headlights from a Miata Italia kit and round tail lights, with the chrome trim pieces and bumper in the front removed.
What?
What are you asking about?
What?