I´ve been digging through the sales material scanned in on www.thesamba.com and some of my own collection to see what names were given to these vehicles.

There have been several official names during the years, to say the least
The attached list is based on the brouchures I´ve had access to see so there might be more names to come

The years are not 100% reliable since VW used the same sketches for years and sometimes only with more or less poor updates.
On the Samba site they mostly just write what language that´s printed in the brouchure, so it´s been some extra digging to find out what the actual country has been. Is it for instance french from France, Belgium or Canada? They use different modelnames
I think I´ve managed to figure them out right now, but I might have missed some..

For some markets VW used the number of seats as modelnames in the brouchures. VW Achtsitzer or VW Huit Places, this is a bit of a problem for us since we rarely can see how many seats there are in the cars. For germany they originally named the buses Kleinbus, and this name reappears during the years. Sometimes Kleinbus sometimes Siebensitzer or whatever. Old french brouchures, from France, I havn´t seen but in the sixties the denomination VW Car appears for the Buses. Maybe it´s been used earlier too?

Anyhow my suggestion here is that we might use Kleinbus/Kleinbus Sondermodell for german buses and Car/Car De Luxe for the french buses if we can´t be sure of the actual number of seats.
I guess that they´ve been known like that mostly, outside of the sales literature where it´s not been of less need to point out the possible interior choices.

The Kombi and the Bus looks about the same, but if it´s painted in only one single colour it´s most likely a Kombi, Buses normally came in two-tone paint.

About the denomination Samba, it´s only found in the dansih brochure from 1960: Samba Bus. Apart from that it´s mentioned like this (Samba) in some mid sixties brouchures from Holland and in similar way in some price lists printed by local dealers. So they rarely seems to have been officially named like that. Even if this "nickname" is very common today.

And finally about De Luxe spelling, it varies over the years in different prints but the far most common spelling is De Luxe so I use it consequently since it would be a bit over the top to use different variants with or without space since it´s used back and forth.

So, enjoy the reading and I hope it´s useful for the coming work of renaming a great deal of the T1:s that we have on the site...

Great work
It is strange that Samba name was not more used.

Thanks

Well, I guess that Samba is somewhat semi-official since it´s seen in some material. But it looks to me like it´s treated more like a nickname by VW at the time. And I guess it wasn´t very known on most markets in those days. But I don´t know for sure of course.

While talking about VW busses, I still think that we could list more properly the Typ 2 and avoid to have the Tx info in chassis field but have it instead in mk field.
Previous discussion was
http://imcdb.opencommunity.be/forum_topic-713-Precision_for_some_VW__Typ_.html but really did not had much success
As said there this would have the downside of mixing generations of T1/T2/T3... what do you think?

I think the system we use here is a good compromise even if the generation markers T1/T2 etc. are nonofficial really.
But they serve a good purpose in keeping the generations apart since we have a large amount of Type 2 vehicles on the site. It makes it more comprehensive this way in my opinion.

Maybe we could change the later T4/T5 generations to their actual Typ-numbers since they are specific for each model.

Splendid work, Richard!

I, too, would keep the current way to fill the chassis field until we have a more detailed database ... and some admins with good knowledge and a lot of time. There are at least 67 different chassis codes for the T1 alone, not counting the Brazilian models.

A little late, but great work DAF555!