It is no surprise that many cars are good-looking. After all, they are sold into a competitive market where emotions inform buying decisions. But surprisingly few cars are actually so beautiful that they are almost art on wheels. Of these, many are exotica – Jaguar’s E-type and the Lamborghini Miura spring to mind here. The VW Karmann-Ghia Type 14 is that very rare thing – an absolute sculpture of a car that was part of a perfectly ordinary vehicle range. Admittedly it was a halo model, but the Type 14 was very much a Volkswagen, a variant of the Type 1 Beetle.
As a platform, the Type 1 was highly adaptable, a fact not lost
