I was already a VW nut  back almost 30 years ago when it became known
that VW was developing a waterboxer. My local independent VW
parts/machine shop in SoCal even had a WBX motor on display before they
were available in vans. It was mounted in a little shrine area in the
showroom for customers to ogle.

IIRC, the automotive press explanation back then was that VW had  labor
relations issues at some engine manufacturing plant. They needed to keep
the plant open and needed enough work for it to be practical to do so.
The plant made boxer engines of the 1600 class variety. Worldwide demand
was switching to emissions controlled engines and the little airboxer
could not make the grade and so fewer were needed but the product still
had to be produced for certain applications. VW decided to build a new
engine that could use as much of the existing tooling and machinist
stations as possible. The waterboxer was the child of this necessity.
The waterboxer is the last evolutionary step of the type1 engine.

Waterboxers were produced and fitted to T3 Vanagons for a period of 10
years, beginning summer of 1982 and ending in the summer of 1992. The
first and last years were small production numbers. Interestingly,
diesel engines were also used for that entire period in the same
vehicles. Since the diesels are members of the VW inline 4 cylinder
engine family VW could have easily adapted a gas version if they saw
enough reason to do so. When the inline gas 4 cyl engine was later used
in South African vanagons it was with mounting parts from the diesel
engines of the prior European production.

Mark

 Zeitgeist wrote:
> Porsche now owns a controlling stake in VW.
>
> While I'm not nearly as much of a WBX basher as some of the silly whiners
> around here, I do think they should've saved the millions spent in R&D and
> just culled from the VAG parts bin and slipped in an inline (Gas) Audi 2.3
> fiver and VW 1.8/2.0, and (Diesel) Audi 2.0 fiver and VW 1.6/1.9 and called
> it good.  No need to piddle around with the ancient pushrod stuff linking
> back to the thirties.  That said, the WBX is a surprisingly robust engine
> despite itself, but there was still no valid rationale for its very
> existence.
>
>