International Bus Treffen, Hannover, 5th-7th October 2007
VW don’t organise meetings but when they do, they’re probably The Best Bus meetings in the world
This story starts back in June 07 when we attended a bus tuning meeting at The Hockenheimring. Whilst having a few beers with some German friends, we were told that one of them was involved in organising a show for VW to celebrate 60yrs of bus production. As you can imagine, it sounded intriguing so he sent us more info.
Volkswagen commercial vehicles had decided to organise a one off event in Hannover to celebrate the 60 th anniversary of the trusty type 2. Due to venue availability, the final decision was only made in April 07 and things had to move fast. We're pleased to say that VW came through and pulled it off in fantastic style at a rumoured cost of over 4 million euros!.
For those who missed it, this is our report from the VanWest team tour.
Having made the usual channel crossing, we headed for the old ‘Kaferwerks’ at Wolfsburg where a factory tour was arranged. Nowadays 46,000 humans and countless robots building 600+ Golfs a day (owing to the VW official secrets act we can’t tell you anything about the tour, and only show you a photo of the outside of the buildings!!) Inside the factory grounds is the Autostadt – Germany ’s 2nd biggest tourist attraction (we wondered what was #1?) - a futuristic landscape and many modern structures housing scientific and artistic displays around Volkswagens numerous marques.
Our two favourites were the classic car display (mainly V-dubs) and the twenty storey storage towers where all the new cars get processed through to their new owners. The visit was a full days tour, so Wednesday we planned a morning in the world famous museum - but catastrophe struck - the museum was closed for renovation! DEVASTED we skulked off to Hannover where there were already hundreds of bus fans descending on the city and we started on the steins a little early to drown our sorrows. (We later found out most of the Buses had been brought from Wolfsburg to the show anyway, which made us feel much better).
On to the big event heads cloudy but full of expectation!! We were driven into the factory and taken on a 3.5km walk around and shown the T5 being made from a roll of galvanised steel to the finished latest “Bulli”edition. This was a fascinating place with computer controlled robot trains ferrying parts to the correct locations and 8,000 tonne presses stamping out perfect panels. Interestingly, if all the presses were to be in operation at once, the factory would shake to the ground so even that has to be perfectly synchronised.
By now Hannover was bursting with buses and it was clear that this was gonna be a huge event. The following morning (Friday), we arrived at the Expo site to be warmly greeted, have our bus portrait taken and handed a goodie bag of biblical proportions containing some unique memorabilia. Once camped, we sat and watched the huge array of vans arrive throughout the day, notably mostly T3s.T4s and T5s which won’t be any surprise to those of you regular European show visitors.
By late pm the site was busy and the display areas opened, almost all the food or drink stands were VW Vans including the original 1962 splitty commissioned by Becks brewery. The display started with Ben Pon’s original note book drawing, then prototype’s, the first coach built splitty, first production split and so on - including LLE number 2500 right up to the present T5 business class carat. Another area saw all the commercial variations such as cherry pickers and emergency services vehicles, some of them still in commission. There was a separate area for modified vehicles including a T5 crew cab with Porsche 996 bi turbo motor etc. Two huge stages had been erected with huge screens showing all the old VW adverts and lots of archive footage rarely seen before, the evening concluded with the Movie “Little Miss Sunshine”.
Everyone awoke Saturday morning to the sound of more vehicles arriving and another goodie bag containing 6 fresh bread rolls and a newspaper. After breakfast the trade area opened and was soon very busy. Throughout the weekend there were lots of demonstrations such as how to fit air ride suspension on a T5, trick BMXers, kids competitions and so on. The LLE Kartei put on a fine array of limited last edition vans, as did many clubs to compliment VW’s own efforts. Saturday evening saw things hot up a notch with a German TV crew presenting various awards on a special drive on, drive off stage, live entertainment continued with an awesome performance by “The Who” and “Sasha” which concluded in the early hours.
Sunday morning netted another batch of fresh rolls and everyone said their goodbyes over breakfast before setting off to various corners of the earth.
On reflection, we would have considered selling our granny’s teeth to attend what was a real one off gem of an event with an essence of total quality. We hope our pic’s will go some way to ease the pain if you didn’t make it.
Best wishes and we hope to see you all 9th-11th May at Vanwest 2008 !!.
Regards, The Vanwest Team