In Europe and in the United States Volkswagen stopped offering its iconic air-cooled engine in the late 1970s. The situation was different in Latin America, where the air-cooled flat-four was popular into the early 2000s.

When Volkswagen do Brazil finally gave the flat-four the axe it wasn’t because of slow sales but because of newly-passed noise restriction laws that were scheduled to take effect on January 1st, 2006. Mounted in the type 2 (called Kombi locally), the four-banger was two decibels too loud. Air does not boil, as Volkswagen’s advertising department repeatedly reminded customers for years, but air-cooled engines are inherently louder than comparable water-cooled units.

The engine’s noise could have been brought down to legal levels by adding extra sound deadening material but that wouldn’t have solved all of the engine’s legal issues. By 2005 the Brazilian government had already announced that it was planning on implementing strict pollution regulations for commercial vehicles in 2007 and the Kombi’s flat-four exceeded the allotted level by about 45 percent. There was no easy or cheap way to modify the age-old engine to comply with the new regulations.

The final nail in the flat-four’s coffin was that it could not be modified to run on ethanol, a corn-based fuel that is widely popular in Brazil. With these problems in mind Volkswagen decided to phase out the flat-four in favor of a water-cooled 1.4-liter straight-four that was already found under the hood of the Fox hatchback.

Volkswagen had already offered several water-cooled Kombis in Latin America. A notoriously unreliable diesel-powered variant was sold in Brazil from 1981 to 1985 and a water-cooled 1.8-liter engine was shoehorned into the van’s engine bay in Mexico in the 1990s. Volkswagen used the front-mounted radiator setup from the 1.8-powered Kombi to cool the new ethanol-burning engine.

The demise of the air-cooled flat-four marked the end of a long and important era but Volkswagen has never been one to ignore its own history. The automaker issued a limited edition of the Kombi called Serie Prata (Silver Edition in Portuguese) to commemorate the last air-cooled type 2s built.

As the name clearly implies all of the Serie Prata vans were painted in light silver metallic with flat black bumpers, door handles and headlight bezels. They were equipped with tinted windows, clear turn signals up front, smoked taillights and an overdone retro-style “Kombi Serie Prata” emblem on the bottom left of the tailgate.

The van’s interior boasted some minor changes, starting with an edition-specific upholstery called Malharia Colméia. The trunk got a standard rubber floor mat and a “Kombie Serie Prata” emblem was affixed in the instrument cluster, to the right of the speedometer.

The Kombi Serie Prata was powered by a 1.6-liter flat-four engine that made 58 horsepower and 81 lb-ft. of torque thanks in part to a multi-point fuel injection system. Bolted to a four-speed manual transmission, the engine sent the van from zero to 62 miles per hour in a lackadaisical 26.1 seconds. For the sake of comparison the 1.4-liter four-banger that replaced the air-cooled unit made 78 horsepower and 90 lb-ft. of torque, enabling it to hit 62 miles per hour from a stop in 16.6 seconds when burning gasoline and 16.1 seconds when running on ethanol.

The last Kombi Serie Prata rolled off the assembly line on December 23rd, 2005, mere days before the new noise regulations came into effect. At the time the van carried a base price of 39,200 Brazilian reais, less than the 1.4-equipped Kombi’s price of 41,393 reais. The 200 examples built by Volkswagen sold out almost immediately and a lot of them ended up in the hands of collectors in Brazil and abroad.

Brazilian magazine Quatrorodas billed the Serie Prada as an instant classic that was represented an excellent investment. “Buy it and put it on jack stands,” they wrote, “in ten years a European collector will offer good money for it.”