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This is Tigger. We named him that because he’s kind of orange (technically he’s Assuan Brown but let’s not quibble) and pretty bouncy. And he’s a lot of fun. He’s a 1982 Vanagon that started life with a diesel engine but somewhere along the line inherited a mid-1990s 1.8L Jetta gas engine. And a magnaflow exhaust. So he has plenty of “get up and go” but he also sort of sounds like a 17 year old boy’s first car… definitely not the quiet putter you usually hear from Volkswagen vans.
We’d (namely me) been looking at Volkswagen vans ever since we rented a camper van in Iceland back in 2015 and enjoyed it so much. But the right van didn’t come along until the spring of 2017 when we saw Tigger for sale on UsedVictoria. I wasn’t desperate to buy a van and had slowly kind of put together my dream VW van… not a classic bus (I love the look of them but they’re not really my style and the good ones have gotten very, very expensive)… not a Eurovan (they’re just a bit too much like an RV)… so that really only left a T3 Vanagon that VW had put out between 1979 and 1990. Beyond that, I wasn’t going to be too picky. It just needed to be relatively cheap and in decent shape. And along came Tigger…
He’d been up for sale earlier in the year and the owner had recently put him back up at a reduced price so I thought it might be worth at least taking a look this time and maybe going for a test drive. At this point, Marie didn’t realize that I was at all serious about buying a van and was more than a little taken aback when I told her I’d made arrangements to go and look at a Volkswagen van… This is not the first time Marie has been surprised by my decisions… Long story short, it was love at first sight… For me… Marie was not so smitten… But she was intrigued…
So we let the owners know we needed to think about it and then went for a bite to eat and weighed the pros and cons (translation: I set about convincing her that what we really needed in our life was a 35 year old van with 265,000 miles.. yes miles!.. on it). In the end, I must have been at my most convincing that day because she agreed that we could make arrangements with the owner to bring it into town later in the week so I could take it to the local VW shop and have them do a pre-purchase inspection. And if it came back fairly decent and we would make it happen. I was pretty excited… So I beetled on down to Beetle Auto Service (conveniently located not all that far from our house) and made arrangements for them to give the van a thorough going over and to let me know if it was something they’d consider purchasing at the price being asked… I’ll write more about Beetle Auto Service in some future posts but the short version is they’re fantastic to deal with and were a big part of the reason we ended up buying the van… because if you’re going to own a high mileage, 35 year old van you’re going to need a good mechanic and they seemed like the real deal.
Their inspection found a few things that needed immediate repairs (namely the brakes) and a few things that would need some work but that could wait a while… but overall, they were pretty impressed with the van and thought that the van was in very good condition mechanically and was in excellent shape cosmetically (he spent most of his early life in Texas where they don’t use a lot of salt in winter so he’s virtually rust free). Being a VW specialty shop they particularly liked the Jetta conversion (instead of the usual Subaru engine that many Vanagon owners go with) because it’s still a VW engine so it won’t run into any problems with VW shops not having the necessary equipment to work on Subaru engines…
By this point, I was pretty well sold on Tigger but the required repairs were going to necessitate some haggling with the owner… In the end, we settled on them lowering the asking price by the cost of the required repairs and we ended up agreeing on a price that was much lower than I’d expected to get into the world of Westfalias for and the rest is history…