What You Can Do with an Electric Volkswagen Bus

The Shapiro brothers, Gefen and Yona, who are nineteen and sixteen and Harpo Marx look-alikes, own eleven cars between them, including a Girl Scout-green 1972 MG Midget, a blueberry-blue 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider, and a 1926 Chevy truck that’s known as the Superior (and is the only one they haven’t got running yet). Gefen owns five, Yona owns two, and they share four. They mostly buy wrecks on Facebook Marketplace, or else they find them in people’s driveways. Gefen’s favorite is his 1972 Saab Sonett, a coupe the color of a tangerine and whose motor roars—half ferociously, half pathetically—like a dying lion. He’s also got a 1980 Fiat Spider convertible with a crapped-out starter that he and one of my kids found in a field in Vermont. Sometimes, Gefen keeps his Midget in my driveway. Last week, we went drag racing. Gefen drove the Sonett, Yona rode shotgun, and I drove the 2025 Volkswagen ID. Buzz, two-tone, lemon yellow.

Volkswagen bus fans like me have been waiting for this thing—the plug-in electric Buzz—for a quarter century. VW first teased a reboot of the bus in 2001, three years after it introduced the rebooted Beetle. The electric VW bus finally came out in Europe in 2022, and I wrote a long piece about it for the magazine. Now that a slightly bigger version is making its début in the United States, Volkswagen sent me one, for a week-long test drive.

I discussed the situation with Gefen. I don’t know how to write a car review, but I’ve watched a lot of “Top Gear,” so Gefen and I pondered what possible “Top Gear”-style stunts I might undertake with my Buzz—a limited set of possibilities, given that Jeremy Clarkson and I are made of different stuff. We decided we ought to race my Buzz against his Sonett, even though my Buzz has two hundred and eighty-two horsepower and his Sonett has sixty-five, and my Buzz can go from zero to sixty in something like six seconds, while his Sonett, he admits, “can’t get to sixty.”

Gefen paid twenty-nine hundred dollars for his Sonett, about a year ago, and then rebuilt the engine and replaced the clutch. The VW ID. Buzz starts at about sixty thousand dollars, but if you want the sunroof and all-wheel drive, or anything fancy, you pretty quickly get above seventy thousand dollars. This is an insane amount of money to spend on a car, especially if you like junk-yard clunkers.When I was Yona’s age, I helped my brother Jack fix beat-up, rusted-out wrecks that he found in classified ads. We moved the Ping-Pong table and turned our garage into a body shop. Jack glammed up and flipped a 1967 Camaro (“That I wish I still had,” he says), a 1968 Mustang, a 1967 Chevelle convertible, a 1973 Gremlin, and a 1976 Hornet. Unlike Yona, who is a lot shrewder than I am, I didn’t own any of these cars, or even any part of them, not so much as a hubcap. But I loved them. I especially loved using the rivet gun. Ftt-fffffttttt.

I bought my first car, a used VW Golf, in 1989, for about what Gefen paid for his Sonett. It had a lot of Fahrvergnügen, which was, at the time, VW’s savviest advertising pitch. One of my sisters worked at a dealership, and she got me a Fahrvergnügen sticker, which I stuck on one of the blanks on my dash so that I could go into Fahrvergnügen mode. I had that car for two weeks before I totalled it, but, right up till that crash, it was a blast. Since then, I’ve mainly had VW buses, including two Vanagons. Our last one, a 2002 Eurovan, died this summer, and we donated it to Kars4Kids. This September was the first time we’ve had no VW bus in thirty years. And then, one day this month, the new bus rolled into our driveway, as if it belonged there, like a long-lost cat who, one sunny morning, turns up at the kitchen door.

To be honest, I didn’t expect the Buzz to be fun. E.V.s are a drag. You usually can’t shift. You’re barely allowed to do the steering. But, it turns out, the Buzz is a trip. It’s like riding in a spaceship, but in a good way. I took Gefen for a ride. He said, “It’s just like your Eurovan, except it runs.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with it for a week, except drive it around and give rides to friends. I decided to take it on a few little adventures. When our Vanagons and Eurovans were still running, we used to take them to Good News Garage, home of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a.k.a. Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, who hosted NPR’s “Car Talk” for decades. (If NPR is interested in a reboot, I hear Gefen and Yona are available. . . .) Ray is still around, so I drove the Buzz over to the shop.

“This is pretty swanky,” Ray said, poking around the three rows of seats. We climbed in.

“Your chair can give you a massage,” I offered, as we headed out for a ride. He rolled his eyes.

“Do you think people are going to buy it?” I asked.

“Not for sixty-five thousand dollars,” he said. He likes the old buses, “ ’68, ’69, ’70, ’72, after that, they started to get to be a pain in the neck.”

On Memorial Drive, we opened it up. “This thing does fly, though,” he said, a little begrudgingly.

Next, I drove to Boston Volkswagen, where the general manager told me he was hoping to get forty-eight Buzzes from VW. He figures he could sell hundreds, but VW won’t allocate the dealership any more than that. Later, I had to take the Buzz back there, to the service desk, because one of the sliding doors got stuck—wide open—while I was out for a spin on a very cold day with a friend who’s an environmental-law professor. “We are now in ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ ” I screamed, as the wind rushed in. We were freezing. He proposed a new VW motto: “Our E.V. van brings you closer to the great outdoors, whether you want it or not.”

I wanted to go on a road trip, to test the range—two-thirty, two-fifty, not enough—so I decided to drive the Buzz to John’s Car Corner, in Westminster, Vermont, which, from Route 5, looks like a VW-bus graveyard. John Hamill, eighty-four, has owned more than twenty-seven hundred cars.He bought his first Volkswagen in 1966 and called his first VW auto shop the People’s Car Company. Currently, he drives three Vanagons. His favorite is a red one from 1990.

“Every day, I wake up, and I think, I get to drive my Vanagon today, and I am happy,” he told me. He’d never seen the Buzz. I took him for a ride. He didn’t mind that it looks a lot like a Toyota Sienna. He could see the bus in the bones. While we were standing in front of his shop, a lady came by and offered to buy it. This happened a lot. In parking lots, at taco stands, at the grocery store. Even now, when it’s still in my driveway, which means there’s no room for Gefen’s Midget, people come by, look at the Buzz, and knock on the door: “You willing to sell that?”

To get ready for our drag race, Gefen and I watched the race in “American Graffiti,” with Harrison Ford, who’s got a miniature human skull dangling from his rearview mirror.

“That’s so fire,” Gefen said.

Harrison Ford’s 1955 Chevy 150 runs off the road, rolls over, and explodes.

“Uh, I’m not doing that actual thing,” I said.

“I know, ” Gefen said. “You’re such a baby.”

I wondered where we should race. Yona had an idea. “There’s that stretch of road where it’s two lanes,” he said. “Out past that synagogue?”

The night of the race, we headed out in a convoy. We had to drive through the synagogue parking lot and come out the other side to get lined up at the traffic light. I had Yona on speaker phone.

“Why so many people here on a Tuesday night?” Gefen asked, weaving through the parked cars.

“Hebrew school,” Yona said.

“Remember that time, after Eli’s bar mitzvah, that we crammed, like, fourteen kids into the Eurovan after the dance party to drive everyone home and Momo thought he was going to throw up?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gefen said. “That was fire.”

We pulled up, side by side. Buzz, Sonett. Lemon and tangerine. No one behind us, no one in front of us, no one anywhere.

“I’ll count three,” Yona said.

“O.K., yeah, but we’re only going, like, fifty yards, right?” I asked. “Because this is all of a sudden kind of scary.”

“No, this is so cool,” Yona said.

“And illegal?” I ventured.

“Chicken,” Gefen said.

The brake on the Buzz has two lines on it, like a Pause button. The accelerator has a little triangle on it: a Play button.

Yona cleared his throat. “Three! Two! One!”

I smoked them. ♦