Kübelwagen

The Kübelwagen is one of 315 Volkswagen models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1940. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Kübelwagen properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1940s were a decade split in two by war — civilian production stopped almost everywhere, and the cars that followed 1945 carried pre-war engineering into a world desperate for transport. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Ford Lincoln Continental, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Stepvan, the International International K and KB Series — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Kübelwagen reads like this: the record lists its engine as 985 cc air-cooled Flat-four engine / H4 / 1,131 cc air-cooled Volkswagen air-cooled engine / H4; kerb weight is recorded at 725 kg empty / GVW = 1160 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; / self-locking differential / portal gear reduction by 1.4:1; the layout is RR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Volkswagen story

Within Volkswagen's own catalogue the Kübelwagen sits alongside the Volkswagen Apollo, the Volkswagen Routan, the MPV Tehran, the Volkswagen Arteon (2017). The record names the successor = DKW Munga (in German military) / VW type 181 Thing / 182 Trekker as its predecessor and the DKW Munga (in German military) / VW type 181 Thing / 182 Trekker as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Ferdinand Porsche. Assembly is recorded at Germany: Stadt des KDF-Wagens.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Kübelwagen costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.