The Meyers Manx 2.0 Is How the Past Should Become the Present
Electric Vehicles
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, the vintage Doune buggy, a fascinating era in the mid to late sixties. When these cheeky fiberglass creations sat on a bunch of scavenged Volkswagen beetle guts, and then became iconic. Look at the original Thomas crown affair with Steve McQueen, ultimately delighting and terrifying fade Dunaway, or come forward decades in James bonds being attacked by bad guys in a little fleet of these things. They [00:00:30] have this enduring charm, but this isn't just a Doune buggy. This is where they all began. This is a Myers mans, and now we have the Myers Banks's 2.0, this is the new dune buggy from the original maker of dune buggies. It's a triumph. And going back to the past and bringing it forward, let's take a look.
Speaker 1: The original Doune [00:01:00] buggy was a Myers banks developed by Bruce Myers in 1964, such a sensation, especially out here on the west coast, that SCDs of other companies began to make kits very similar. Also riding on a VW chassis, but Myers failed in a battle to patent the design. So by 1971, he was out of the game because everybody else was in it. Now as much as I love the original Myers man's Doune buggy, it never looked this good because this has had some real pro styling put upon it by Freeman Thomas, you know, his pen [00:01:30] from the original Audi T T the new beetle, when it came out. Now, there is no connection between his VW associated roots and the fact that this car used to be something that rode on VW roots, it's kind of a fascinating coincidence, more than anything else. Most importantly, the new Manx is electric more on that in a minute. Take a look at how he's brought in some nice cues from back in the day. Texture coded black crinkle finish headlight buckets with nice Chrome surrounds [00:02:00] a Chrome push bar up here, as well as one in the back. The roll bar inside is all nicely Chrome, just enough to take you back and not with too much sort of modern filigree, just enough to make it fresh. And frankly cleaner than the original
Speaker 1: Inside things stay simple. And I can't tell you how happy I am that there's no LCD dash in this thing. They get it. There's a very simple, sort of a reinterpretation of the old VW dinner plate, speedometer, [00:02:30] some buttons on the side here and inside. It's this same spare kind of tub that you swear you could hose out when you get back from a day on the beach. That's how Steve McQueen would've done it. Threeway top. By the way, you can have a cloth BI top. You can have a hard top, which is in place right now, or you can take the whole thing off and have it be an open top car. And by the way, these piston supports right here tell you that we've got a hinged pivoting apparatus. So the back can open up to give you some, some access to that rear [00:03:00] compartment. A little utility never hurts
Speaker 1: And dig that crazy fabric, man, short of Pasha in a vintage Porsche. This is about as good as it gets in terms of retro accuracy, but don't let all this simplicity in here suggest as things, a death trap far from it, they're gonna have an aluminum MoCo tub. So the whole thing's gonna have front and rear crash zones. I mentioned the roll bar, by the way, the windshield support is also a functional roll bar and many other basic [00:03:30] safety items, including a tilt collapsible steering wheel. So this isn't the kind of death wish roll of the dice that a sixties era Doune buggy would've been now back here is arguably where the biggest changes have occurred in this vehicle as it became a 2.0, this is where you used to have the noisy greasy stuff. The VW engine sat in here with a fascinating bunch of pulleys going around and a giant usually megaphone Chrome exhaust, sticking out all that gone.
Speaker 1: Of course, now they have an electric motor that sits back here and ahead of it, you'd find [00:04:00] three, two, I think six battery packs, depending how much range you choose. I like the idea of the 150 mile model, the base car. If you will, you don't need 300 miles outta one of these. That's not the point comes in around 15, maybe 1600 pounds, curb, weight, feather weight. So a relatively modest electric motor and battery and power train should do wonders in terms of responsiveness. That's my guess. And you got a little better center of gravity on this one, cuz the batteries pushed that weight forward [00:04:30] where on the original VW powered one, everything was just sitting right back here at the bumper line. And by the way that rear electric motor is actually motors. Two of them paired together, one driving each rear wheel, not all wheel drive. The front wheels are busy with imagine this luxury electric power steering in a dune buggy. They're taking orders for these. As I speak, this is late August 20th, 2250 beta cars come out in 2023 to people who have a really good reason, [00:05:00] not just the money to buy one. They want the real fans to bang on these things and then they go into a little more production in 2024.
