I have little experience with sandrails/dunebuggies (prefer bugs, bus' and ghias) but those old aircooled motors will last forever if you make sure to do the routine maintenance on it. I personally dont see any stock aircooled VW powered anything being THAT fun to drive (partial to high performance aircooled motors)... but itd be a good place to start to learn the basics of the aircooled drivetrain. I encourage anyone to tinker with aircooled anything, theyre simple, fun and easy to learn; plus if you do the work yourself can be fairly inexpensive, regardless of what some people will tell you.