In 1972, independent auto designer Curtis Brubaker merged the Volkswagen dune buggy movement with the California custom van craze and created a memorable vehicle he called the Brubaker Box.

An alumnus of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Curt Brubaker worked in the Cadillac advanced styling group in Detroit before moving back to the Los Angeles area and setting up his own independent design practice, the Brubaker Group. Soaking up the Southern California car scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s, he borrowed elements from the numerous automotive subcultures there, including VW dune buggies, surf woodies, and custom vans, and from them he created his own unique vehicle that defied all the existing vehicle categories of the time. He called it the Brubaker Box.

Essentially a molded fiberglass cuboid that mounted on a Volkswagen Beetle Type 1 platform, the Box had only a single sliding door on the right side to keep the structure as simple and rigid as possible. To save costs, the windshield was borrowed from an American Motors product while the rear glass was El Camino. Barely 53 inches tall but with van-like packaging that offered intriguing possibilities, the Box generated a healthy buzz at the 1972 Los Angeles International Motorsports Show, allowing Brubaker to attract $160,000 in funding. A 17,000 square-feet production space was secured and modest plans were laid to produce five vehicles per month at $3,995 each, with hopes of eventually ramping up to 400 per month.

Car and Driver magazine featured the Box on the cover of its March 1972 issue with the blurb, “the best thing that ever happened to a Beetle.” But unfortunately, Volkswagen disagreed. The German automaker declined to sell Brubaker new Beetle chassis assemblies, citing the obvious product liability issues. This forced the company to purchase complete Beetles at retail to serve as donor vehicles and the project became economically hopeless. Only three Boxes were constructed, one of used in a forgettable kid’s sci-fi series  on CBS television called Ark II, before the original company was closed down.

At that point one of the investors acquired the molds and started another company called Automecca, which offered the Brubaker Box in kit form in various stages of completion as the Roamer Sports Van. Approximately 24 or 25 of these kits were sold, reportedly, so if you happen to encounter a Brubaker Box on the internet or at a car show, the chances are excellent that it’s actually one of the later kit jobs. In 2018 a California company announced plans to reproduce the Box, once again in kit form, as the Boxx.