Brazilian "JEG"

mackaymanx · Post by **mackaymanx** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:05 pm

I don't know if you guys know about this, but I came across this awhile back . It seems to be a brazilian version of the County Buggy(australian) or the american 181. Hope some of you can read portugese

http://www.planetabuggy.com.br/extintos ... stovam.htm

ztnoo · Post by **ztnoo** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:46 am

For a translation, try this: http://babelfish.altavista.com/
Enter the URL in the "Translate a Web page" cell, then choose a language from the "Select from and to languages" drop down menu.
It's a pretty rough translation, but will give you some sense of the text content of the page

Paul Illick · Post by **Paul Illick** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 5:08 am

The translation doesn't say much, but I can tell the story behind the JEG. Back in the '50's Volkswagen wanted to build a manufacturing plant in Brazil. The Brazilian government wanted a native, not foreign, industry to develop, so they made a deal with VW that VW would make components available to Brazilan companies that wanted to get into the automotive manufacturing business. So a number of Brazilian companes discovered, just like Bruce Myers, that you could bolt almost any kind of fiberglass body onto a VW pan and drivetrain, and create a totally different car.

And these Brazilian companies took the VW pans and went wild! The most popular was the Puma sportscar http://www2.uol.com.br/bestcars/classicos/puma-1.htm, the Gurgel http://www.gurgelbrasil.com/, the Envemo, and later the varoius Chamonix Porsche copies http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Track/4152/ sold by Chuck Beck. The Beck 550 Spyder is probably the best known up here. The JEG was just one of the lesser-known of these "home-grown" Brazilian cars based on the VW chassis and drive-trains. Kind of a fiberglass 181 by somebody other than VW.