German Irish vehicular collision

In 1995 I took up the offer of a call centre job in Tallaght near Dublin. A good friend of mine who was doing doctoral research at UCD put me in touch with a fellow student who had just taken a lease on a house together with his wife and were looking for a lodger. Over the course of my first few months in the Republic I got to know David, the student, quite well. He told me that he had spent time in Lindau, a town in southern Germany, where he had worked in a vineyard. On one occasion he showed me photos taken during a cycling trip around Swabia, one of which was of an unusual vehicle he had seen parked on the road near Reutlingen. It was a classic VW camper but with the top sliced off and replaced with the top half of a Citroen 2CV, making a rather ungainly looking mini double decker bus. Some months later, while I was working on the German-speaking team at the call centre, a fresh wave of recruits brought with it one Stephan Gaertner, a native of Reutlingen. Getting to know Stephan better, he told me of a project he had once embarked on to build an unusual vehicle. He had had to seek special approval and directions from the local MOT office to ensure that it would be street-legal and in the end had succeeded in creating two such vehicles. The idea was all his own and, as far as we know, they were the only two vehicles in Germany at the time. As soon as he told me this story, I remembered the picture David had shown me. Subsequent checking of the registration plate in the photo revealed that the it was indeed one of the two VW-2CV hybrids created by Stephan. Yours, Simon J PS Reutlingen is the twin town of my home town, Ellesmere Port, but that is scarcely coincidental?