The Volkswagen Plattenwagen Was Wolfsburg’s First Pickup

Volkswagen is celebrating 75 years of the Bus, which entered production on March 8, 1950. The idea of turning the Beetle into a commercial vehicle wasn’t new, however. The original Transporter was years in the making, and the Plattenwagen put the Beetle’s flat-four to work well before the first Bus was built.

The name might not ring a bell, and the odds of finding a Plattenwagen in your local classifieds are non-existent, but this home-made-looking flatbed shaped like a pickup beamed from the Bizarro World was really built by Volkswagen. It traces its roots to the middle of the 1940s, when Beetle production resumed in the Wolfsburg, Germany plant. At the time, Volkswagen was under the control of the British military.

It didn’t take long for Volkswagen to realize that its factory needed a vehicle to perform the kind of jobs you’d use a forklift for today: hauling crates of parts from one end of the plant to the other, for example. The problem was that buying a forklift was easier said than done at the time. Volkswagen wasn’t sitting on a lot of cash, and raw materials were very difficult to come by so new forklifts remained a rare treat.

Volkswagen cleverly created the Plattenwagen as a temporary solution to this problem. How the model was designed is lost to history, but what’s certain is that it wasn’t given an internal development code; it was pretty much born on the factory floor. Volkswagen raided its parts bin to keep production costs low, and it improvised when it couldn’t find a part. This is the very essence of function-over-form design.

Some variants of the Plattenwagen were built on a shortened Kübelwagen frame, while others rode on a modified Beetle frame. Power came from the familiar air-cooled flat-four, and parts such as the steering wheel, the speedometer, and the seats were off-the-shelf components. The seats were positioned directly above the engine, so the passengers overlooked a flat loading platform that sometimes had side rails.

The first Plattenwagen was let loose in the Wolfsburg factory in 1946, where it hauled parts, tools, and even the so-called Nordhoff tea given to workers on the assembly line. This oddly-shaped pickup worked exactly the way Volkswagen envisioned, and it stuck around even when forklifts became widely available. Volkswagen built the final Plattenwagen in 1973, and some reportedly didn’t retire until the early 1990s.

Volkswagen notes that there’s no such thing as a standard Plattenwagen because there was no template. It sounds like no two examples were exactly alike, even if they were built in the same year, and the model went through several evolutions over the course of its long production run. The 1973 example shown here features a Bus-sourced engine cover, which wouldn’t have been available in 1946. It also has a plastic top and a pair of individual seats. Others were fitted with a bench seat and not equipped with a top.

Here’s where the Bus comes in. Dutch businessman Ben Pon Sr. reportedly spotted a Plattenwagen while visiting the Wolfsburg plant in the late 1940s. The truck proved that the Beetle could spawn a commercial vehicle, and he used it as inspiration when he drew the sketch that spawned the famous split-window Bus.