Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle
Volkswagen built the original Type 1 Beetle in essentially the same form from 1938 all the way through 2003, a production record approached only by that of the Hindustan Ambassador/Morris Oxford. There was only one version of the Type 1 that differed greatly from the original in its chassis engineering: the Super Beetle, sold in the United States from 1971 through 1979. We admired a used-up 1970 Beetle convertible in Nevada last spring, and now we've got this first-year Super Beetle in Colorado.
The Super Beetle was an attempt by the suits in Wolfsburg to buy time until the introduction of modern cars with water-cooled engines driving the front wheels, which showed up here in the 1974 (Dasher) and 1975 (Rabbit) model years. The main feature that made the Super Beetle super was the replacement of its funky torsion-bar front suspension with a futuristic MacPherson strut rig. The traditional four-wheel drum brakes remained, naturally (to be fair, even some Rabbits had drums all around at first).
The Super Beetle got a completely revised front body in the process. The car's overall length increased a bit, making room to lay the spare tire flat (instead of being angled upward as in the regular Beetle) and providing much more cargo space in the frunk. For 1973, the Super Beetle got a space-age windshield with curved glass, merely a couple of decades after the rest of the automotive world.
You need to be a fairly serious air-cooled VW aficionado to tell the Super from the regular Beetle at a glance; the most obvious giveaway is the longer and flatter hood.
The Super's rear suspension was the same as all the (1968 and later) Beetles.
The engine was the same between the two models as well. If this is the original (which is possible but doubtful, given how easy it is to swap these things and how plentiful VW air-cooled engines used to be in the junkyard ecosystem), then it's a 1585cc boxer-four rated at 60 horsepower and 81.7 pound-feet.
