When Volkswagen revealed the ID.Buzz two years ago, the company sold it as the “rebirth of an icon” — that famous silhouette, the VW Bus and with all its cultural clout, was finally back. Now, though, Volkswagen has released pricing for the revived bus, and it’s a departure from what made the Type 2 great.
The new ID.Buzz, in North American spec, starts at $59,995 for the base rear-wheel-drive Pro S trim. Buyers looking for all-wheel-drive will need to step up not just to the Pro S Plus trim — $63,495 — but to the additional 4Motion option on top of that, which totals out to $67,995.
Back in the heyday of the original Bus, 1967, it could be had for just $2,150 — the equivalent of $20,555 today. In fairness, 1967 marked the end of the T1’s run — by which point tooling may well have been paid off 0ff — but it’s an interesting data point when considering accessibility. Today’s prospective van-dwelling, tour-following hippies need to shell out nearly triple what their parents did. (Probably worth observing that most of the Dead fans I know in 2024, whether they’re elder millennials or boomers, are pretty well-off. —ED)
But, comparing MSRP to MSRP isn’t as apples to apples as you might think. Average new car transaction prices have far outpaced inflation, meaning it’s not really fair to compare the ID.Buzz’s price based solely on the latter. In 1967, the average new-car transaction price was $3,215, meaning that a Kombi cost about 67 percent of average. Recent data puts 2024’s average new car transaction price at $48,644, meaning that a modern Bus would come in around $32,530 — still barely over half what the ID.Buzz costs.
But even that doesn’t take into account greater economic factors. The average household income of the U.S. in 1967 was $7,200, meaning a T1 would cost about 30 percent of your combined salary — call it four months’ pay, give or take. Estimates for 2024 average household income (we won’t get the firm data for a couple years) put the number at $78,171, which would put comparable ID.Buzz pricing at… $23,295? Wow. Early Volkswagen Busses were cheap.
Truly, the ID.Buzz’s best point of comparison may be the 1979 bus — the last year of the T2 generation in the U.S., by which time Volkswagen was charging a premium above average new-car transaction prices. A ‘79 Bus, based on the same average pricing math, would come out to just under $52,000 today. That’s not egregiously far from the new car’s $59,995 cost, but it’s also in a different class the bus that Volkswagen is trying to evoke, which is true of the rest of the VW line as well.
VW wants the ID.Buzz to remind you of the original Type 2 bus, with its multicolored paint schemes that run down the van’s front end, but it forgets a big reason why that old bus became such an icon: People could actually buy them. Hippies could get their hands on a T1 for a fair enough price, and the bus became inextricable from their oh so recognizable aesthetic — firmly imprinting cultural clout on those 13 or 23 windows. With the new bus, Volkswagen is cashing in on that clout to the tune of 60 grand, but that means this new Bus won’t reach the same heights of recognizability as the first. At least, not new out of the box. We’ll see how the used market treats it.
