78 bus top speed

[chicagovw]

One of the buses in my plumbing service fleet happens to be a 1978, panel van with ladder rack and equipment inside. It has about 135,000 miles on the original engine, which I believe to be all original internally (I purchased it with about 47,000 original miles about 8 years ago), and the only time the engine has been out is for a clutch replacement about 5 years ago. It is bone stock, fuel injected 2.0 and will do 75 easily even with the ladder rack, but in the name of safety, when I drive it I typically do about 70 in it. The techs are pretty good about keeping it within a nickel of the speed limit-they know we are watching via gps.

[buckswilde]

Floored my 79 bus with FI on the highway yesterday for the first time. Pulled strong until about 75 mph. I backed off at 80 and don't think it had much left.

[yellowCOwesty]

Up here at altitude mine is most comfortable at 65 mph. It will do faster but I have to really push it.
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'78 Westy
Currently yellow and white "Sunny"
A few other air cooled VW and Porsches over the years

[WhirledTraveller]

Bus speedos are notoriously inaccurate.

Rough calculations, a bus with a CD of 0.42 and a frontal area of 38 sq ft. at 72mph needs 41hp to overcome aerodynamic drag and 11hp to overcome rolling drag.

I have seen results on this forum for a stock 2.0 engine on a chassis dyno making 52 hp at the wheels. Not sure the RPM but probably in the upper 4000's

Based on this, the top speed on level ground no wind should be around 72mph presuming that the gearing puts the HP peak right around that point, which should be pretty close.
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1977 Westy, Automatic. Big Valve heads, CS Cam.

[airschooled]

[rsbadura]