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well, technicly the heater uses heater boxes that surround the outside of the exhaust manifolds and the fan inside the shroud blowes air into the boxes and into the car, so your experiance was...unique to any thing I've heard.

and your semi right, the mexico plant just stoped production of the "classic" bug in 2003. A very sad day in the life of a bug fan, I begged and begged my parents to take me down to the farwell serimony but they said it was to much work.

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Nope... time to do a little more research... on the various heating systems used on Volkswagons... in other countries... and in particular in cold climate countries - like Canada where I live

The heating system you describe was also known as the German Gas Chamber... it was a known serious flaw of the Beetles and in particular the Volkswagon Camper / Hippie Vans. The deadly flaw ( that only would reveal itself after a number of years... is that with rust, age, cracks etc, the exhaust fumes were piped directly in to the heating chamber and in turn directly in to the passenger compartment.

Here is a quote from a VW web site that describes that particularly fatal design flaw :

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The heater boxes are known to rust out and/or get really oily. If they are rusted, the boxes should be replaced because of the potential for exhaust to get into the hot air stream. Be especially cautious if you have even a hint of exhaust smell in the passenger compartment. Exhaust contains the deadly gas carbon monoxide, which is colorless and odorless. Only the smell of exhaust may give the hint that there is carbon monoxide in the car.

http://www.vw-resource.com/heat4.html

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Now... on to what I was describing regarding the gasoline fed flame thrower heater system in Beetles. I think I understand why you were not exposed to it... you don't live in Canada As you know, Canada has two seasons - winter and summer. Not much else. We are either freezing or roasting. As you also would know... the exhaust system mounted heater box is crap. It can barely heat the Beetle in California on a cool morning. So you can imagine that in Canada the 'stock heater system' just would not cut it up here. So our Beetles were equipped with the flame thrower gasoline fed heater systems...

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Some folks in the cold north use some kind of heater supplement (usually a gas heater) when driving in the winter.

http://www.vw-resource.com/heat4.html

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What I was describing is a genuine gasoline fed heater system that burned gasoline to generate the heat. The best way to describe it... is that when you lifted the hood of the Volks Beetle, connected to the firewall at the drivers side, there was this gizmo that looked like a small cylindrical vacuum cleaner ( we use to call them 'pigs' ). This device was about 22 inches long and roughly 6 inches in circumference. A line fed raw gasoline in to this unit. In the car, there was a thing that could best be described as a choke cable. What you did is you pulled on that knob a couple of times and it basically spritz or vaporized raw gas in to this burner (priming the heater) I forget how we use to instruct the thing to ignite the gas... possibly it was a heater switch that lit up an element to ignite the gas and turn on the heater fan. There was a fairly powerful fan mounted on the one end of this pig that blew air in to the pig, and that air, along with the burning gas would be propelled towards the heating ducts that lead in to the passenger compartment of the car. It was a noisy affair... with that powerful fan blowing and the gasoline igniting. Quite noisy. Almost like standing in the middle of a typhoon. But when it worked... it could completely heat up the insides of a Volks in about 3 minutes.

Something that you might be familiar with...is a heating device used by home builders called a 'Salamander'.. which is a propane powered heating device. It is probably the large scale equivalent to the gasoline powered heater.

At this point.. all the other car owners are probably piddling their pants and laughing at the very thought of have a heater on their car that is basically a gasoline powered flame thrower attached to their 'firewall'...

And at this point you will have a better understanding why I piddled my pants and dumped that entire fire extinguisher into the thing when it caught on fire. I really feared that the fire would spread to the gas line that fed the heater from the gas tank. I was trying to prevent the Volks from being blown sky high...

I tried to find some info about this on the Internet, but the best i could find was a web site that described all the various 'supplemental' gas powered heater systems made for the Volks campers to supplement their exhaust powered heaters.

Anyhow... the whole point to the story is that Canadian and cold climate countries had these flame throwing gasoline powered heaters installed by the factory... so that is why you probably have never seen one in the warmer climates of the States
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