Skip to main content

Ratty Rescue: Green Work Machine

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been pairing each week’s Find Of The Day with a matching Ratty Rescue. We try to find a lousy version of the nicer car that an enthusiast can fix up. But what do you couple with a Japanese faux Microbus? How about a European faux pickup truck? Well, it’s not a “real” pickup by American standards.

Volkswagen has sold work trucks since just about day one. A parts-delivery vehicle cobbled together from a Beetle chassis inspired the original Microbus. Myriad models spun off of the Type 2 platform including passenger vans, pickups, delivery vans, and even fire trucks. Volkswagen now has an entire commercial truck line offering buyers an array of models and body styles.

For a work truck, this 1992 DOKA (“doppelkabines”) is in decent condition. Like the old Rabbit-based Caddy pickups, it is front-wheel-drive. This DOKA has a 2.4 liter 5-cylinder diesel engine with 95,000 miles. While that might seem high, diesel engines of this era are incredibly reliable. A number of key elements have been replaced on the engine, so there’s plenty of life left on the motor. The diesel engine is paired with a 5-speed manual transmission.

[See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com]

Outside the truck has some typical wear; dents, dings, and light rust on the frame and rocker panels. For a knock-around commercial truck, it’s not bad. There’s one larger dent on the top of the cab. It has all three flip-down bed panels (note the integrated step in the tailgate) and while worn, they all work properly. Have we mentioned that this DOKA is very, very green?

The interior is also in good shape. Check out the killer seat fabric; it’s straight out of the 90s. It’s not perfect, but work crews are probably tough on vinyl seats. Even jauntily striped ones. It has a Clarion head unit that “works when it wants to.

It’s interesting to note that commercial trucks like this are just now catching on in America. Ford, Dodge (sorry, RAM), and Nissan are now offering front-wheel-drive work vehicles. But by American standards, this German truck will never be a “real” pickup. Front-wheel-drive? Five-cylinder engine? Flip-down bed panels? It’s all too strange by our standards.

So if you’re confident to rock a faux pickup, check out the eBay listing. Current bid: $9,084 and the reserve has not been met. Or you can buy it now for $11,995. This green machine is in Northampton, PA.

The post Ratty Rescue: Green Work Machine appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2QrC3kP
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more