A car born before the war
The Beetle started as a political project. Germany’s government wanted a cheap “people’s car,” and on June 22, 1934 Ferdinand Porsche received a contract to develop it. The project was run by the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) organization. Historians still debate how much of the basic design was Porsche’s own: the engineer Béla Barényi had sketched a similar concept as early as 1925.
The foundation stone of the factory near Fallersleben was laid on May 26, 1938. War came before ordinary buyers ever got their cars, and only about 210 KdF-Wagens were built by the end of the war. The town around the plant was named Wolfsburg in April 1945.
The British restart
After the war the factory stood in the British occupation zone. British forces put it back to work, and a British Army officer, Major Ivan Hirst, is widely credited with reopening it. Series production of the Beetle sedan began on December 27, 1945.
Simple by design
The Beetle’s layout stayed the same for its whole life: an air cooled, horizontally opposed four cylinder engine in the rear, driving the rear wheels. The engine started at 1,131 cc, grew to 1,192 cc in 1954, and later versions went up to 1,584 cc.
Think Small
In the United States the Beetle’s image was shaped by advertising. In 1959 the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach created the Think Small campaign for Volkswagen of America, with art director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig. The name said it all: the ads built on the car being small. Bob Levenson was among the copywriters on the first 100 ads, and William Bernbach supervised the work. In 1999 Advertising Age named it the best advertising campaign of the 20th century. Beetle sales in North America grew fastest from 1960 to 1965.
Passing the Model T
On February 17, 1972 the Beetle passed the Ford Model T as the most produced car of a single design, at 15,007,034 units. The Model T had held that record for nearly 50 years.
In Germany the end came in stages. The last Beetle was built at Wolfsburg on July 1, 1974, the last European sedan came off the line at Emden on January 19, 1978, and the last convertible was finished at Osnabrück on January 10, 1980. Production went on in Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria.
The last Beetle
Mexico kept building the car for another 25 years. The final original Beetle left the Puebla plant on July 30, 2003, bringing total production to 21,529,464. The name returned with the Golf based New Beetle, introduced in 1997 as a 1998 model, and its successor, which ended in 2019. Those were Golf based cars that borrowed the famous shape.
Keeping an old Beetle running
A car that is decades old lives or dies by its maintenance record. Oil and other service items come due by mileage or by time, whichever comes first, and Badger’s maintenance schedule tracks both and reminds you before something is due. Our guide to the car maintenance schedule by mileage covers the basics for any car.
