Two Austrian engineers took a 1966 Volkswagen T1 bus, swapped its wheels for rubber tracks and packed it with a DJ sound system. The result is a rolling disco that can crawl up snowy roads and slopes and turn any mountain meadow into an après-ski party.
Who built the tracked VW bus
The conversion is the work of Roland David and Bernd Berger, two engineers from Austria; Berger owns the vehicle. They started the project in 2005 and kept adding to it over the following years. The photographs come from BBSupport, an Austrian events, promotions and design company, and the design site Inhabitat featured the bus as an après-ski party machine.
The base is a fully working 1966 Bulli T1, the split-windscreen Volkswagen Type 2 that became an icon of surf trips and 1960s road travel. Its rounded body stays almost untouched; the changes happen underneath and inside.
Tracks, engine and performance
The wheels have been replaced by rubber snowmobile-style tracks, which spread the bus's weight over a much larger area so it can travel on snow and icy roads. Power comes from a Ford Taunus V4 engine in place of the original VW flat-four, and a separate Honda generator runs the electrics. With all its equipment the bus weighs about two tonnes.
This is a slow, steady machine: it is built to reach a party spot, then stay there.
A mobile DJ booth in the snow
Inside, the bus is a full DJ setup:
- a 1,000-watt subwoofer and two 300-watt speakers
- a five-channel Behringer mixer and two turntables
- a wireless microphone and an iPod connection
Once the bus reaches its spot, a double roof is raised so the sound carries across the snow. The conversion from driving mode to party mode takes about three minutes. The builders aimed it at high-altitude events and electronic-music fans, and called it the most elegant vehicle on the slopes.
Other tracked Volkswagen buses
Austria has a history of putting the T1 on tracks. Austrian Kurt Kretzner converted a T1 box van, built at VW's Hanover plant in May 1962, into a half-track he called a mountain vehicle for hut keepers, hunters, foresters, doctors and lift crews. Only two were made. The surviving one, nicknamed the Raupen-Fuchs, kept its 34 hp boxer engine, ran on aluminium track elements with rubber treads at the rear and reached about 35 km/h. Volkswagen's commercial-vehicle heritage department in Hanover restored it from 2018.
For more machines built for winter, see a conventional car in a winter recovery clip and another promotional idea built around cold weather.
Related reading
- A Snow-Covered Car and the Window That Changes the Joke
- MTT-136: A Compact Electric Tracked-Machine Demonstration
- The Hunter X6 Photo Gallery: A Large Expedition Vehicle with a Domestic Interior
- Track N Go: A Pickup Truck Track-System Demonstration
- The Canadian Ice Truck: Construction, Driving and Melting
- A Nissan GT-R on the Snow at Kåbdalis
- A Car Recovered from an Opening in Lake Ice
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