If you have even a passing familiarity with camper vans, you might feel a spark of recognition at the name Westfalia. The brand become inexorably tied with Volkswagen back in the 1950s and 1960s, when it first began changing examples of the iconic Type 2 Microbus into roving bedrooms with pop-up tent roofs.
From there, the company continued transforming subsequent one-box VWs into camper vans for us for several more decades before fading out of the American market in the early 2000s.
Well, you can’t keep a good brand down — or, in this case, off of US roads. This year, Westfalia is returning to North America with a brand-new camper van.
Westfalia Wave
The Wave is based on the tried-and-true Ram Promaster, which has served loyally as the foundation for many a mobile micro-apartment over the last decade.
The 20-foot-nine-inch van’s interior may be fairly tight even by the standards of Manhattanites, but the Wave can sleep up to six people, according to the brand: two in the primary bed at the stern, two more in the pop-top roof, and two more in the bed that converts out of the dinette table and over the driver’s seat. (Given the size of said bed, squeezing two adults in there sounds like it could violate the Geneva Convention.)
Unlike many a camper van, there’s a full bathroom inside, although it is a wet bath layout with a cassette toilet. There’s a refrigerator, a microwave oven and a propane stove, which may run off the same heating source as the Truma Combi furnace/water heater.
There are 600 amp-hours of batteries and a 3,000-watt inverter handle power inside, while the systems are all controlled by a tablet-style system.
The Wave carries a base price of $155,333, but that’s without the pop-top, which will set you back another $10,374.
Westfalia says that it is “currently in the process of delivering dealer inventory,” so expect to see the Wave on roads very, very soon. There are over a dozen US dealers, along with four in Canada.