Background
Have you heard the one about the Nazi dictator, the Jewish engineer and the surfer dude? Well, the common denominator is the Volkswagen Beetle. You see, it was ‘inspired’ – and I’m being generous with that word, by the Tatra 97, a car designed by the Czech company’s chief engineer, Hans Ledwinka, who happened to meet a chap called Ferdinand Porsche when the pair of them both found themselves working for Austrian manufacturer Steyr.
Adolf Hitler instructed Porsche to build his Peoples’ Car, and Ferdinad drew heavily on Ledwinka’s design. Unfortunately, he also felt that the new Tatra T97 was too similar to the KdF-Wagen project (the basis of the Beetle). As a result, Hitler ordered Tatras to be removed from the 1939 Berlin Autosalon. But the KdF-Wagen used a number of technologies that Tatra and Ledwinka had under patent, and, just before the start of the second world war, Tatra filed a suit against Porsche for patent infringement.
The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia soon put a stop to that (along with love and peace) but after the war VW settled with Tatra out of court for a million US dollars. All of which begs the question; how did the VW Beetle become a hippy favourite?
War in Europe ended in 1945, after six years of terror and destruction, and while the world let out a collective sigh of relief as Germany fell to Allied forces, the factory where Volkswagens were to be built lay in ruins. Located in a buggy swampland along the river Aller in what would later become Wolfsburg, it had yet to build a single civilian model, having been converted to build war munitions and VW-based vehicles shortly after its construction in 1938. Immediately after the war, the only British experience with VWs came when occupation forces stationed in Germany were provided with cars built by the restarted factory.
Production of the Volkswagen – the name Beetle had yet to stick – was plagued by ongoing repairs to the Wolfsburg factory, coal and materials shortages, and by the company not having a true owner. The Allied Military Government placed a Brit, Major Ivan Hirst, in charge of the factory, which was put back into service to fulfil an order for 20,000 VWs for the occupation forces.
An ex-Opel executive, Heinz Nordhoff, was hired to run the place when the British began attempting to transition ownership of the Wolfsburg Motor Works, as it had come to be named, to almost anyone who would take it. Henry Ford II refused to take the operation as a gift; the British auto industry also had no interest in the car or the factory. Undeterred, Nordhoff set up exports to Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and Switzerland. Nordhoff’s zeal for exports was less about expanding the VW’s sales and more about bringing in hard currency from outside Germany. Sales were strong at home, but German currency wasn’t worth much. The factory needed machinery from abroad, particularly from America, and holding foreign currency would be a boon.
One of VW’s first export markets was Holland, where a man by the name of Ben Pon sold 56 cars so successfully that Nordhoff called upon him in 1949 to make a go at the US market. A few cars had made their way to the States by this time, brought over by returning servicemen as the occupation wound down. Pon travelled to New York with a single VW and some spare parts, but anti-German sentiment remained strong, and the trip was a disaster. Pon was forced to sell the car and attendant parts in order to pay his hotel bill and travel back to Europe. Nordhoff tried for himself later that same year, but he too was rebuffed. At the same time ownership of VW was finally transferred from the Allied Military Government to the West German federal government.
In 1950 VW finally managed to export a car to the USA, as an east coast car dealer, Max Hoffman, was appointed exclusive VW importer. Hoffman sold 330 VWs, mostly to other dealers throughout the U.S. The cars were cheap, and dealers found they weren’t that difficult to sell.
By 1951, the original Type I’s cable brakes were replaced by hydraulically operated drums at all four corners, and the engine gained a Solex carburetor. Power swelled from 24bhp to 30. In 1952, Volkswagen fitted the transmission's second, third, and fourth gears with synchromesh.
The split-rear-window design so coveted by VW collectors today was replaced for 1953 by a slightly larger, single oval rear window, and for the first time, Volkswagen increased the Beetle engine's displacement from 1131cc to 1192cc. Power rose again to 36bhp.
In 1955, with production humming along, Volkswagen built its one-millionth Beetle in Wolfsburg. Only about 9000 had made their way to the US, while the majority buzzed around Europe.
In 1967 the Beetle – as it was now universally know – gained a 1500cc engine and 12 volt electrical system, and in the same year a Californian called Bruce Meyers perfected his idea of the Beetle-based dune buggy. California beach culture spawned a few kit cars that used the Beetle's floorpan, engine, and transmission, making it straightforward to pick up a scrapped Bug and transform it into a wild beachcomber. A few years of development resulted in Meyers' kit, the Manx, leading the pack, and the Beetle became part of surf culture.
A year later and the Disney film The Love Bug featured a Beetle called Herbie, cementing the car’s iconic status with yet another generation of drivers. In 1970 the biggest standard engine ever fitted was introduced, a 1600cc flat four, still with a lightweight magnesium alloy crankcase. By 1972 the 15,007,034th Beetle rolled off the Wolfsburg line, matching the production numbers of the Ford Model T, but two years later the last car built there was made.
In 1975 Beetles gained fuel injection and a year later the last car was sold officially in the USA, while production continued apace in Brazil and Mexico, where the final model was built in Puebla, in 2019, 80 years after Ferdinand Porsche's team was first commissioned to build the prototypes. Over its incredible life span more than 21,000,000 Type 1 Beetles were sold.
