Westfalia Is Back! Is a VW ID Buzz Camper Far Behind?
The German brand epitomized by pop-top 1970s Volkswagen busses returns to North America, but with what?
Okay, so there's no guarantee that we'll ever see a Volkswagen ID Buzz Westfalia electric microbus cruising Santa Monica's Pacific Coast Highway behind a vintage 1971 Volkswagen Westfalia camper during a summer weekend sunset. But it's not impossible—and that alone has us all sorts of excited.
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But we do know that we are going to get Westfalia vans (of some type) once again, and of course that the U.S.-spec ID Buzz is coming. Yes, iconic Westfalia camper vans are making their return to the North American market in 2024, and the 2025 ID Buzz should be hitting our shores in the third quarter of 2024. Westfalia and VW go together like peanut butter and jelly, and with our culture's current obsession with van life, foregoing an ID Buzz Westfalia pop-up camper van (as rendered in this story's main image) would be a mind-boggling missed opportunity.
It's safe to assume, however, that Westfalia will initially return to the North American market with an upfitted pop-top Ram ProMaster, as indicated by the beachy header image of Westfalia Americas' website that shows happy surfers obscuring a Ram-based camper. After all, Westfalia already makes a pop-top version like this in Europe based on the Fiat variant of the ProMaster, the Ducato, as you can see below.
We'll know more once a pre-production Westfalia camper van is revealed at a large RV dealer show at the end of the month. The sparse website basically touts #westfaliavanlife and implores viewers (even "vintage Westfalia van owners") to "secure your spot at the forefront of updates—receive exclusive notifications for Westfalia camper orders, sneak peeks of upcoming class B motorhome models" and so on.
Westfalia campers—whatever type(s) of campers they turn out to be—will be built by Roadtrek in Ontario, Canada. Roadtrek has a bunch of Ram ProMaster van upfit models, so a Westfalia ProMaster makes sense. The Westfalia and Roadtrek brands belong to the Rapido Group of France, Westfalia having been acquired in 2010 and Roadtrek in 2019. The third-generation, family-owned Rapido Group has twelve recreational and van brands with factories in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada. Its sole connection to North America is its Kitchener factory site (Ontario, Canada), which houses the Roadtrek brand—and now Westfalia Americas.
Stay tuned as we learn more about this relaunch of Westfalia. We're expecting good vibes; the surfboard says so.
