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Dear Alan Presley, One should not be confused by the fact that the 2-door EA97 prototype on display at the VW Museum in Wolfsburg has "1960" written on it. If you have a close look at the car on display you will see, from the number of components which have clearly been taken from much later production line parts bins, that it was made long after 1960, more likely about 1965 or 1966 or maybe even later. In fact, EA97 (or "Entwicklungsauftrag Nr 97") began in 1957 and there were two stages of this project. The first ran from 1957 to about 1963 and was intended as a design study for a possible Beetle replacement but its size got out of hand. Realising this by 1960, VW upgraded the project into a second stage which became a design study into a possible alternative to the then well advanced Type 3 project. By 1965 this EA97 stage 2 had developed and changed such that it had become a possible upgrade for the Type 3 and, indeed, 200 different examples were built, including a 2-door sedan, a 4-door sedan, a 2-door wagon or Variant and even a 2-door cabriolet. All were built on the wide floor pan similar to the Type 3 but many had the Beetle Type 1 ball-joint front axle beam rather than the Type 3's cross-over torsion bar axle beam. Some had the Beetle Type1 upright fan motor while others had the Type 3 pancake motor. However, at this stage this upgrade of the Type 3 was shelved in favour of the "Langschnauzer" or longnose Type 3 design which eventually came off the Wolfsburg production line in August 1969 as 1970 models. Nevertheless, all the dies and tooling for this well-advanced EA97 project were not discarded but (after some delay caused by a shipwreck) were sent to Brazil where it entered production. Thus, in December 1968 Volkswagen do Brasil introduced their version of EA97 and called it the VW1600 4-Portas. This was the 4-door version of EA97 and it built on the wide Brazilian Karmann-Ghia floorpan because the Karmann-Ghia was already in production in Brazil and for reasons of economy it was decided not to manufacture another separate wide floorpan. The 1600 4-Portas was also fitted with a German Beetle ball-joint front axle (Brazilian Beetles and Karmann-Ghias always only had king-pin front axles) and a twin carburettor version of the Beetle upright fan motor. So, it could be regarded as a bit of a hydrid rather than a pure Type 3 except that these modifications to what was essentially a Type 3 project and incorporate in it a number of Type 1 components were carried out in Brazil for reasons of economy. They clearly saw that it was cheaper to use an existing Karmann-Ghia wide floorpan with its Beetle-style front axle beam and to use an existing motor then used in Beetles. (Brazilian Beetles also used a twin-carb version of the upright fan motor.) Later, the flat pancake Type 3 motor was used from late 1970 and by 1978 the evolving Brazilian Type 3 had become quite sophisticated with a McPherson strut front end, rack and pinion steering and a CV-joint (IRS) rear end ( the VW Variant II). And, incidentally, more than 430,000 of these evolving Brazilian "EA97 Type 3s" were made between December 1968 and December 1981. The first of them, the 1600 4-Portas which is currently on sale at Ebay, was in production between late 1969 and late1971 and probably close to 100,000 of these were made. So, while they may be rare in Europe and USA, they were not so rare in Brazil. And, later two-door wagons or Variants and the four-door fastback versions were exported to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as to the Philippines and Nigeria. Regards, Simon Glen Toowoomba, Australia. "Alan W. Presley" wrote: > Sorry PerL, > > THIS car from eBay was introduced in 69. > > The actual EA97 prototype was produced in 1960 > > go here > http://www.mtv3.fi/autot/artikkeli140.html > items in the Wolfsburg museum ------------------------------------------------------------------- Search old messages on the Web! Visit http://www.vwtype3.org/list/