The surfaces and all those lovely shapes, they’re not at all like the Manx, they’re another rendition-but I think they’re very beautiful. Q: What do you think of when you see the ID Buggy?Ī: It’s beautifully styled. It was a rearrangement of my mind-thinking about happiness instead of drudgeries, worrying about nothing more than smiling faces and getting a club started. I started a club, the Meyers Manx Club, which has now has 5,400 members. So I started thinking about the smiling faces again. Every dune buggy has a pair of smiling faces and you put them there.” Don’t you know half of the people who screwed you over are dead, and the other half don’t give a damn? You have to stop and think of the two smiling faces in the dune buggy. They put me out of business.” He said, “Wait a minute, you’re still mad? That was 24 years ago. So I told him, “I’m not going to lead those fuckers anywhere. We were invited to France in 1994 by the publisher of Super VW Magazine and he said “I’ve got 1,1000 VWs and we’re going to have a parade around a race track, the first 200-300 are fiberglass dune buggies and we want you to lead them.” So I took a look at the cars and saw they weren’t mine. I’ve never been terribly interested in a lot of money, it’s more of what I do that brings me pleasure in my life. I was so upset, I didn’t want to hear the words “ dune buggy,” and went back to tooling sailboats and restoring cars. We went from 25 kits a day, to 20, to 15, 10, then shut the doors and went out of business in ‘70. When the press learned about the Manx losing the patent, that was it. We wound up losing the patent, and I realized judges and lawyers don’t know anything about art or anything about what drove the dune buggy’s success. Soon after, I took Lincoln Industries to court for copying my design. I got a crew together, moved into a bigger facility, and we were able to build up to 25 kits a day. I started staying overnight, making new molds .
MODERN DUNE BUGGY KITS DRIVER
But in the second year, 1968, the Manx was on the cover of Car and Driver and then we had 300 orders all at once. Nobody seemed to give a good goddamn, they just liked the look of it. I just did it in the beginning without realizing what the hell I was doing. Q: When did you know you had a hit on your hands?Ī: It came slowly. The simplicity of it is, of course, the only way I could do it…but doing it simply leads to the best character. There’s no doors and windows, so a lot of people come over and talk and ask you about it. The Manx was also inspired by Mickey Mouse, the funny papers, in that any little dinky car with big wheels screams fun-it’s cartoonish. So a good figure drawing is the best essence of the dune buggy. Learning to draw with a lot of gesture, movement, a sense of life, as though the figure is going to get up and walk away any minute is key.
The thing about portraiture is you have to be very accurate, and the thing about figure drawing is you have to have a sense of movement and life and gesture. I spent many years at art school drawing, especially figure drawing and portraiture. And I brought a sense of that to the buggy. I had a bunch of characters around me in those days, crazy kids-they were my dear friends-college kids without the college, wanted to leave their mark. That windshield, it’s so blatant, and those pop-up headlights, they seemed to be thumbing its nose at tradition. Q: What was your inspiration for the original Meyers Manx?Ī: There’s a little sense of the Model T in the front. We sat down with Meyers at the New York Auto Show to pick his brain about how he originally came up with the idea for the dune buggy, what he thinks about VW’s new iteration, and hear what he has to say about today’s recreational off-roading scene. In the years since Meyers built the first Manx, it’s risen to cult status, playing a part in The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen, conceptually fathering the modern side-by-side, and in 2019, serving as the inspiration for VW’s all-electric ID Buggy concept. And in part because of its success, creator Bruce Meyers has risen to the status of legend-a man who can arguably be credited with being the godfather of purpose-built recreational off-roaders. In fact, the vehicle’s official name is the Meyers Manx. But in spite of its notoriety, plenty of confusion still swirls around about it, with people assuming that it’s a Volkswagen-it’s not, it just borrows the engine from VW–or that “ dune buggy” is actually the name smeared on its hood. The Dune Buggy is arguably one of the most iconic vehicles of the 20th Century.
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