End of the road for the VW Kombi

It's the end of an era…Volkswagen will stop manufacturing its iconic campervan the VW Kombi after this year.

The Kombi is now manufactured only in Brazil, the biggest car-purchasing company in South America, after Volkswagen stopped producing the old-style ‘Type 2’ campers in the UK in the late 1970s.

But newly introduced Brazilian safety regulations say that all new vehicles manufactured in the country must come with dual front airbags and anti-lock brakes as standard. This means that to comply with the new regulations, the simple Kombi would have to become ‘a new car’, according to VW Brazil's product development boss Egon Feichter.

The last Kombi models will be made on December 31 2013, 63 years to the day after the first Kombi was built and the day before the new regulations come in.

Up until then, there will be around 250 new Kombis rolling off the production line every day at the VW factory in Sao Paulo, so there's still time to snap one up.