For a car that was in large part the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, who wanted a “people’s car” for Aryan families, the Volkswagen Beetle has done remarkably well to last for 80 years. Hitler commissioned it, laid the cornerstone for its famous factory in Wolfsburg and was presented with the first convertible version. The design of the new car, which bore an uncanny resemblance to a stormtrooper’s helmet, was then adapted for military use and produced using slave labour. Quite a beginning.
You would not have thought the car the Führer named the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen (“Strength Through Joy Car”) would have survived the collapse of the Reich, but survive it did – until last week, when VW announced the Beetle had reached the end of the road and would not be produced after 2019. In fact the Beetle did more than merely survive its unfortunate birth. It became the world’s most popular car, and still has claims to be the best-selling vehicle based on a single platform. The Toyota Corolla has sold more units, but the Corolla is really a brand name attached to a variety of different model types. From 1938 until 2003 the shape of the Beetle barely changed; 21.5m were sold.
In a sense this is the Beetle’s second death. Production of the Type 1 – the beloved version with the engine in the boot – was phased out in 2003, and the two versions produced since, while drawing on the original’s heritage, never had its quirky appeal or popular success. The “New Beetle”, launched in 1997, looked like the original but its engine was in the front (how dull); the even newer, lower-slung Beetle unveiled in 2011 bore only a passing resemblance to the Type 1. The real Beetle had already been killed off; now the epigonic variants will disappear too.
The great paradox of the Beetle was that the Nazi-mobile developed in the late 1930s and mass-produced from the 1950s became the representative of the counterculture, beloved of Californian surfers and radicals of the Woodstock generation. At a time when many Americans were driving vast, gas-guzzling saloon cars, the Beetle seemed to represent a friendlier, greener alternative, even though in reality quite a bit of gas was being inefficiently guzzled.
America’s love affair with the Beetle was cemented by the string of Disney films starring Herbie, a sentient car that was forever outwitting villains in large black saloon cars. It is no coincidence that the first film in the series, The Love Bug, appeared in 1968 – the year of global youth protest. Hitler’s car had been transformed into the perfect vehicle for generational and class animosities.
What probably is a coincidence – though the coming together of cultural references seems too good to be true – is that the car immediately behind the Beatles on the cover of Abbey Road, parked just beyond the famous zebra crossing, is a white Beetle. The licence plate of the car, LMW 281F, was repeatedly stolen after the album came out in 1969, and the car eventually ended up in the VW museum in Wolfsburg. For VW it was manna from heaven: Beetles, Beatles … the circle was complete.
Bugs in the US; Beetles (in a variety of languages) in Europe – the lovable, wheezy, modest but knowing little car had imprinted itself on a generation. It is telling that the Beetle and the Bug did not begin as brand names but were adopted by VW because that’s what the people who bought the cars called them. The Beetle really had become the people’s car. It was a nice touch that when the New Beetle was produced in the late 1990s, it incorporated a flower on the dashboard – a homage to the flower power generation that had taken the original to its heart.
The fact that the performance of the original Beetle was lacklustre hardly mattered; in fact it made it even more desirable. It was a car for people who didn’t really like cars. “It was never much fun to drive,” wrote the novelist Geoff Nicholson in 1999. “It was a nightmare going round tight bends and lethal in a crosswind … The old Beetle was quirky, eccentric: the engine was in the wrong place; the pedals seemed to be in the wrong place; rear visibility was thrillingly, dangerously nonexistent.”
He was presciently explaining why he didn’t think the New Beetle had much of a future: it was too good, too much like every other modern car, a “Golf Mk 4 in fancy dress”. Americans initially warmed to the retro appeal of the New Beetle, but then they decided they preferred SUVs after all. Nicholson was spot on in his analysis: “The New Beetle, I suspect, will come to be seen as a footnote to the original, but as footnotes go, it’s a good ’un.”
There are many books about the Beetle, including an academic history published in 2013 by Harvard University Press. Harvard would not normally concern itself with such fripperies, but the Beetle is more than a car; it’s a thread running through the 20th century, which is why even the footnotes are good.
The car’s decline from the 1970s on – 1971 was the high point when 1.3m were produced – tells us something significant. Our relationship with cars has changed. Who now, other than a few Partridgean men, would feel emotionally attached to a car? We might use them as status symbols – hence the popularity of four-wheel drive Range Rovers in the posher parts of London – but we don’t love them. Disney isn’t going to make half a dozen movies about the Ford Focus.
Motoring is no longer fun. It’s tedious and, worse than that, it’s bad for us and for the planet and for children who have to breathe in noxious fumes. VW, which once revelled in the love for the Beetle, has more recently been rocked by the “Dieselgate” scandal, in which it was shown to have been cheating on emission tests for its diesel models and claiming they were less polluting than they were. Herbie the Toxic Bug.
The future is electric, with simple, non-polluting boxes probably operated with minimal human involvement (sentient cars!) getting us from A to B. The era when cars were enjoyable, idiosyncratic and representative of the nations and the times that produced them – think Mini, Morris Minor, 2CV, Trabant – is over. Motoring today is just about getting there without emitting too many noxious gases and finding a parking space you can squeeze into.
Hinrich Woebcken, chief executive of Volkswagen in the US, announced the death of the Beetle with a heavy heart and didn’t rule out another resurrection one day. “I would say, ‘never say never’,” he intoned. But that would surely be a mere footnote to a footnote. The Beetle has finally been killed off because, for better or worse, motoring in the future will be bug-free.
• Stephen Moss is a Guardian feature writer
