1979 T2 Double Cab (Type 2)

1979 was when the 1970s showed its teeth. Three Mile Island in March. The Ayatollah in February. Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in July. The Iranian hostage crisis in November. The decade that had started with so much countercultural energy was ending with gas lines, inflation at 11 percent, and a general sense that things were more complicated than anyone had hoped.

In Hanover, Germany, the assembly line that built the Double Cab Pickup was completing its final year of production. Nobody was staging a demolition night for the Doka. It went out the way it had come in: quietly, doing the work, completely indifferent to the cultural weather.

The 1979 Double Cab Pickup — body code 265, Doppelkabine, Doka — was the final year of the most useful configuration in the Type 2 lineup. Two rows of seats in the crew cab, seating five, with an open cargo bed behind. The most powerful drivetrain the Doka ever received: 2.0-liter Type 4, 70 horsepower DIN, hydraulic valve lifters.

Four-speed manual or three-speed automatic. IRS rear, torsion bar front. Squared Europa bumpers — the 1970s emissions and safety regulation look that distinguished late Bay Window models from earlier examples. T2b Late Bay styling in its final expression.

The cargo bed was the point of the whole machine. Open sides that folded down. Wood-plank floor rated for real payload. A truck built on a Bus platform that somehow managed to be shorter than most American compact trucks while carrying comparable loads and five people.

The 1979 Doka was the most powerful and the most refined the Double Cab had ever been. The 2.0-liter with hydraulic lifters represented the peak of Type 4 development for this platform. No valve adjustments. Maximum torque. Final evolution.

It was also, in retrospect, the end of something that cannot be replicated. No manufacturer has since produced a forward-control crew-cab pickup at this scale — a vehicle that fits in a European parking space and simultaneously carries five people and a commercial payload. The gap left by the Doka's discontinuation has never been filled, only approximated.

The last of anything is special. The 1979 Doka carries the weight of finality. German production ended in July 1979. The T3 Vanagon took its place — water-cooled, larger, more modern, less itself. The character changed. The character always changes. But the Doka's character was specific and unrepeated, and 1979 was the last time you could buy one new.

The world of 1979 was not a comfortable place to operate a small business. Inflation made material costs unpredictable. Interest rates were climbing toward the 20 percent they'd reach in 1981. The second oil shock, triggered by the Iranian revolution, had returned fuel prices to crisis levels.

Against this backdrop, the Doka's economics looked good. Not cheap to buy, but cheap to operate. The air-cooled engine had no water system to fail, no coolant to buy, no radiator to spring a leak on a job site fifty miles from a parts store. The 2.0-liter, with its new hydraulic lifters, asked less of its owners than any previous Type 4. Fuel economy was competitive with American small trucks of the period.

The small businesses that had built their operations around Dokas were not mourning the end of production in 1979. They were running their vehicles. The mourning came later, when they needed to replace them and discovered that nothing quite worked the same way.

The 1979 Doka drove like its predecessors, with the refinement of a vehicle that had been developed for 29 years. Forward control gave you the panoramic visibility that every Bus driver came to depend on. The 2.0-liter provided torque at low revs — the kind of pulling power that mattered when you were leaving a job site loaded and needed to merge onto a highway.

The four-speed manual was the working driver's choice: more control on hills, better engine braking on descents, satisfying on long empty stretches where you could settle into top gear and let the engine settle into its rhythm. The automatic suited the city driver who wanted one less thing to manage.

Loaded to capacity, the 1979 Doka was a stable, capable machine. Unloaded, the rear bounced on imperfect surfaces in the way of all light trucks without ballast. The driver who understood this — who kept a few sandbags in the bed during winter, who felt the difference with weight on board — had no complaints.

The final-year buyers were the same buyers as every other year: small contractors, nurseries, electrical and plumbing operators, facilities maintenance departments, commercial operators who needed crew capacity and cargo capacity in one vehicle.

A few buyers in 1979 understood that it was the last year and bought accordingly. Some commercial operators bought more than one, anticipating that replacement would be difficult. These were not collectors in the modern sense — they were businesspeople who'd done the math on the vehicle's utility and wanted to extend their relationship with it.

US imports of the Doka were limited throughout the T2's run. American buyers who specifically wanted one often went through specialty importers or European delivery programs. The rarity in the American market has made 1979 Dokas particularly sought after by US collectors today.

The 1979 Double Cab Pickup is among the most collectible Bus variants, and the final-year premium is real. Clean, complete, driving examples with original bed hardware trade at $45,000 to $75,000. Fully restored, documented 1979 Dokas have sold above $100,000 at auction.

Rust is the defining concern. The cargo bed floor, the bed-to-cab transition, the lower cab corners, the rocker panels, the structural members under the bed — all are vulnerable. A Doka that has been worked hard will show it in these areas. Budget for significant metalwork on any project-grade example.

The 1979 is the final year — a fact that matters to the market and should be documented through VIN verification and, where possible, original production certificates. The T3 Vanagon that replaced it is a capable vehicle but a completely different machine. There is no substitute for the Doka's specific combination of crew capacity, cargo utility, and forward-control packaging. Buy the best one you can find.

The 1979 Double Cab Pickup was the end of something that had started when Harry Truman was president and the Korean War was a year old. Twenty-nine years of continuous production. Not one of those years spent being anything other than completely itself: a forward-control crew-cab pickup that hauled people and cargo in a package that no one has managed to replicate since.

Three Mile Island happened. The hostages went to Tehran. Disco gave way to what came next. The Doka kept working until July, when the last one rolled off the Hanover line and the T3 Vanagon took its place.

History doesn't pause for transitions. But some transitions are worth marking. The 1979 Doka was the last of a line worth mourning — not with sentiment, but with the honest recognition that something genuinely useful had been built for three decades and would not come again.