Saturday night
I was upstairs in my old bedroom on Dinwiddie Street when I heard a commotion outside. I peered out of the window down to the street below, and saw three cars parked in the middle of the road, in front of the house; all three cars seemed to have come from different directions, and were facing each other, forming a triangle. One of the cars had been abandoned with its hood open, and the area under the hood had been strewn with some dirty rags and debris. What was even worse was that the car with the hood open was my new VW Beetle. It turned out that my old friend Brud H. had borrowed it to give his own car a jump start, and then left it where it was.
*****
I've never owned a VW Beetle, but Brud had a light blue one when we were in high school. He went through a period when he was drawing pictures of VW Bugs all the time.
The old VW Bugs had their engines in the back; presumably the batteries were in the front. I have no idea how the newer ones were designed.
3 comments:
Why would the battery be in the front? I have no other information on it, but I'd guess it'd be with the engine.
Actually, the classic VW Beetle had the battery under the back seat. This was rumored to have caused a number of classic VW fires.
I'm not sure whether the battery box had a cover that would decay or break, or if there was in fact no cover, but what I remember hearing is that eventually a passenger would sit on the back seat over the battery and make the metal seat framework bend and touch the battery's poles. The seat framework would get hot and ignite the upholstery...
In the future I should probably refrain from hazarding a guess about where batteries are in cars; no one would know less about such things than I. That bit that jddj wrote about the batteries in old VeeWees being under the seats is unbelievable. How could such a thing happen? Were there absolutely no standards whatsoever when they came on the market?
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