One thing one learns quickly behind the wheels of a classic Volkswagen Beetle is that almost everyone over a certain age has an enthusiastic story about owning or riding in one.
For a few days, I had the pleasure of driving the beautifully restored 1964 Beetle, owned by Volkswagen as a part of its noteworthy collection of antique cars – the car was named Max IV, a nod to an iconic Volkswagen ad campaign. And within this small period, I learned a surprising amount about the automotive history of neighbors, family, friends and total strangers. All this knowledge came to me unsolicited – there’s something about these cars that urges people to share their memories.
My mother told me how, during her school years, she was part of a group of eight girls who somehow managed to squeeze into a friend’s Beetle. She wasn’t alone; many others from that time had similarly unusual experiences. I also learned from my father-in-law that he once drove a Beetle after emigrating from Italy to America. And while parked at a drive-in, a woman rolled down her window to tell me about how she bought a Beetle in ’59 while pregnant and how it had a unique little gadget – something called a Hertella Auto-Kaffeemaschine, a dashboard-mounted electric VW Beetle Coffee Maker that was offered for just one year. “Can you imagine?” she said, with gleaming eyes, “I used to brew fresh coffee right there in my car while waiting to pick up my husband from work. The smell alone was enough to make me fall in love with driving.”
I loathe the term “smiles per gallon,” but I must admit, this car brings out more of them than almost any other vehicle I’ve driven.
Although over 21.5 million Beetles were produced worldwide from 1938 to 2003, making them far from rare, you don’t get to see them every day, especially not in the Midwest or in such a painstakingly restored, historically accurate form. They used to be all over the US, or nearly so – undoubtedly the most dominant feature in American transportation, much like an automotive equivalent of blue jeans. If you didn’t own one, you certainly knew someone who did.
Looking at it from the perspective of a man like me, who grew up in a time after the Beetle had already become a vintage item, it’s hard to ignore how surprising and improbable its success in the U.S. was.
Just like the Citroën 2CV, Mini, or Fiat 500, the Beetle was designed to be an economical car for the masses (the clue is in the name: Volks Wagen). Yet its wide appeal outside Germany was unmatched by other vehicles of its era. The fact that it became such an iconic part of American pop culture – used in almost everything from measuring standards to college pranks – during an era of cheap fuel, suburban sprawl, and huge chrome-laden cars is even more awe-inspiring.
There were modern cars that could do a few things better than a Bug, but very few, if any, that could do as many things as well as one. The Volkswagen Beetle struck a rare and brilliant balance between functionality, affordability, ease of maintenance, and yes, overall lovability, which made it a popular choice for an awful lot of people.
I guess most of you can sketch at least the general outlines of the Bug’s long and colourful history, but here are a few highlights. It all started, of course, in a dark time and place: Nazi Germany, in the form of a spinoff of the KdF’s program that aimed at making leisure, entertainment, and consumer goods affordable for Germany’s middle class.
Developed by Ferdinand Porsche, and designed by Erwin Komenda, the vehicle that would eventually become the iconic Bug took inspiration from an indeterminate number of sources, the most significant being Austro Hungary’s Béla Barényi, Tatra’s Hans Ledwinka, and the German car designer Josef Ganz. For some unknown reason, something about this design format appeared to be at the top of car designers’ minds in that era, on both sides of the Atlantic – you may consider the water-cooled Hoffman X8 as an American example.
Anyhow, the vehicle Porsche and company cooked up easily met the criteria set by Hitler for a KdF-Wagen: It would be inexpensive, economical to maintain, and simple enough for a common man to keep running.
Only a handful were built when World War II began; however, the design did spawn a few wartime variants, including the Type 87 Kommandeurswagen and the boxy Kübelwagen, which eventually inspired the VW Thing.
A Third Reich-era outdoor ad promised Germans that a new KdF-Wagen could be yours if you could save a mere five Reichsmark a week.
The car’s close ties with the Nazis didn’t turn out to be enough to condemn it to the archives of history even after the Third Reich’s defeat. And as odd as it may have appeared to the occupying Allies, this cheerful contraption with an air-cooled engine shoved into its tail had some unique qualities that made it considerably more broadly marketable than any usual European economy car of its time. And the availability of intriguing accessories like the VW Beetle coffee maker and the wicker parcel trays made it more lovable.
In contrast to Citroën’s pokey 2CV (also designed in the same era), the Type 1 was developed to benefit from Germany’s newly established Autobahn system – a concept that was later adopted by America, and the Interstate Highway System was born. It was a budget offering that was capable of handling wide, long roads and tight urban streets, plus all the winding, episodically paved country lanes in between. And anyway, putting the Germans to work making anything other than weapons was considered a net benefit to the world at large.
Yet, the Volkswagen Bug wasn’t really an instant success when it entered American borders. Only two were sold in the whole of 1949. The little car didn’t give up. By the time DDB rolled out its memorable “Think Small” campaign in 1959, Americans were buying almost 90,000 Beetle convertibles and sedans every year. But DDB’s self-deprecating, self-aware ad campaign stirred a sort of Beetlemania, in addition to changing the face of advertising in the process.
Just as was the case with the Model T, the Beetle’s strength lay in its makers strictly adhering to simple design with a sprinkle of minor adjustments over time – but this technique too had its limits. Eventually, competitors, mainly from Japan, learned how to build an efficient and affordable small car. Larger, more powerful engines and the rollout of the significantly updated Super Beetle in 1971 only delayed the inevitable; in 1979, Beetle sales ended in America. However, the car was still being built in other countries, with the last air-cooled Bug rolling off the production line in 2003 in Mexico.
The Beetle’s transition from the KdF’s “car for the masses” to an American success story and an emblem of counterculture is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable turnarounds in automotive history as well as modern capitalism. This remarkable success was only possible because the Volkswagen Type 1 was such a fundamentally solid product.
I’ve come dangerously close to buying a VW Bug more times than I can count, and I’ve laid hands on the wheels of several Beetles and Super Beetles owned by friends and family before. However, a few days of sustained use in Max IV were literally enlightening – at least when it came to getting a better understanding of what these cars are actually about. I’ve spent my life experiencing big postwar automobiles, and here the differences between what any average American would’ve been driving in 1964 are stark.
Naturally, the air-cooled engine and its positioning have a big role to play in it. The rear-mounted 1.2-liter flat-four churns out a relatively feeble – on paper – 40 hp and 56 lb-ft. I learned quite quickly that the little motor isn’t shy about taking on the throttle, in contrast to the large, grunty, low-revving classic American cars. The Beetle isn’t slow – or at least it doesn’t feel like it. In fact, it’s quicker than you’d expect once you allow it to really rev up; it helps that the curb weight is anywhere south of 800 kg. I missed having a tachometer, but the speedometer had shift points helpfully marked.
Thanks to its light weight and smart weight distribution, the Bug is a lively handler, too. It’s not a sports car, but it also doesn’t have the wallowy boatiness of an American body-on-frame sedan from its time. It feels deliberate and… almost modern, especially by comparison.
That being said, the nearly agricultural clatter of the air-cooled engine and the odd handling were probably not what attracted insane numbers of Americans away from the V8’s siren song into a Beetle. I feel the Beetle’s success comes down to its incredibly forward-thinking approach towards space and volume. And of course, the low price – a ’64 model retailed in the US for $1,563, around 500 dollars less than a Ford Falcon – didn’t hurt.
Aside from a few outliers like the “step-down” Hudsons, the experience of a classic American car is that of sitting on a couch mounted on a frame, with a Herculean engine that feels like it’s several yards in front of you, sending power to the rear. You’re wrapped in a large, roomy body that looks dazzling parked or zipping down the highway, but it doesn’t connect much with the driving experience. It’s as if the car was designed from the outside in.
Get behind the wheel of a Beetle and this relationship is reversed. You’ll see a deceptive amount of space inside. It’s a masterclass in using space efficiently – maximizing interior room while keeping the car’s exterior footprint and visual bulk to a minimum. The layout seems to be brilliantly planned, with each element working in concert. Putting the flat-four engine in the rear got rid of the need for an intrusive transmission tunnel, giving the passengers more cabin space.
The half-clever, half-odd pinnacle of this interconnected approach to engineering is the Bug’s use of its spare tire – beautifully mounted in the front trunk – as a source of compressed air for the windshield washer system.
America, in the countryside at least, has never punished car owners for roaming in big cars with massive engines – at least not like Europeans do. The Beetle there fought to win customers over with its unique set of features; it undoubtedly provided the American buyer an intriguing value proposition that the local automakers failed to offer. A more revealing comparison, in this case, would be between the Bug and Nash’s subcompact economy car, the Metropolitan.
Developed in partnership with England’s Austin Motor Co., which provided the engines, the Metropolitan aimed to offer the style and comfort of full-size Nashes in a much more compact form. The company’s slogans summed it up well: “Luxury in Miniature.” However, Nash approached that goal in the most reductive manner possible: it practically shrunk down one of the company’s bigger models to fit the 85-inch wheelbase of the Metropolitan – around 10 inches shorter than the Bug’s wheelbase.
Although the Metropolitan featured some ahead-of-its-time engineering elements, like a unibody construction, it looked and felt like a big car made small. While it wasn’t a total failure, sales of the Metropolitan remained modest, with under 100,000 units sold between 1953 and its discontinuation in 1961.
Volkswagen, on the other hand, sold more than 112,000 Beetles in the U.S. in 1960 alone – and by 1969, that number had more than tripled.