Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Buyer's Guide

Emily Chen here. The Karmann Ghia is the car that convinced me the VW air-cooled platform was genuinely interesting, rather than just reliably dull. The Beetle underneath is the same car — flat-four air-cooled engine, torsion bar suspension, the same basic engineering that sold 21 million units — but the Ghia body transforms the experience. Not the performance, which remains modest in the extreme. The experience: the way the car looks, the way it sits, the craftsmanship visible in the panel fit, the sense that you're driving something that was made with care rather than just made.

Ghia designed the body; Karmann of Osnabrück hand-built it — hammering the complex curved panels over forms that couldn't be press-stamped at Volkswagen's production scale. The result is a car with panel surfaces that still reward close inspection 50 years later. That's a manufacturing accomplishment worth understanding.

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