PH Zeroes: Volkswagen Beetle

PH dons its tin hat and spills out of the trenches for a tongue-in-cheek pop at a German icon...

What are your three creepiest insects? Here are mine: spider, beetle, cockroach. Though it seems unlikely that we’ll see a Cockroach on our roads, the motoring world has welcomed a shedload of Spiders – and a veritable infestation of Beetles. 21 million of them, to be exact-ish.

Ever wondered why motoring adopted such nasty beasts? No? Well, I’ll tell you anyway.

According to my grand-dad, who is dead, the Spider connection comes from the delicate roof construction of Edwardian horse-drawn carriages. As for the Beetle, some say that English schoolboys first made the insect association in the early '50s. That’s arguable, as is the origin of the Beetle itself. Some, who may have been Nazis, say that Hitler drew the shape on a napkin while masterfully pointing out the aerodynamic superiority of the beetle to that well-known idiot Ferdinand Porsche.

The most likely explanation however is that the Beetle’s design was nicked from Czech rear-engine gurus Tatra. Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia put the mockers on Tatra’s legal action against Volkswagen, but the case was reopened after the war and Tatra allegedly received a bung of 3m Deutschmarks from Volkswagen in 1961. Make of that what you will.

Either way, the Beetle is one of the best-named and most successful products in history. Not bad for something that didn’t even get its name from its manufacturer, and which was, frankly, crap.

Beetle fans will point to its 65-year production run and say ‘if that’s a failure then show me a success, you git’. But its sales success was almost entirely down to dull attributes like build quality, affordability and reliability – things we take for granted now, but which were conspicuous by their absence among mainstream manufacturers during the Beetle’s heyday.

The Beetle also benefited from a brilliant ad campaign through the '60s and '70s by New York ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. The creative revolution DDB spawned with classic print ads like ‘Lemon’ and ‘Think Small’ was fantastically effective in extending the Beetle’s lifespan way beyond its true sell-by date.

By any dynamic yardstick, though, the Beetle sucked. Unlike the 2CV, which punched well above its proletarian aspirations with removable seating, a full-length sunshine roof, comfy ride and acceptable handling, the Beetle provided no ‘surprise and delight’ features.

Instead, it offered rotten handling, feeble performance and terrible packaging. Front seat passengers were confronted by a vertical tin wall containing a speedometer and a couple of knobs. That may seem cool now, but forty years ago it was simply an unwelcome reminder of how skint you were.

And woe betide the poor sods who had to fold themselves into the back of a Beetle. Today’s ad copywriters would of course be praising the ‘iconic coupé-like lines’, but back then only masochists enjoyed its iron maiden accommodations. The Mk1 Mini had far more usable space.

Think yourself lucky that today’s motor car is largely impervious to sidewinds, because crosswind stability – or the lack of it – was a serious issue for Beetle drivers. The lawnmower engine characteristics of the thudding flat-four meant you could drone along all day at your maximum speed, which might just about begin with an '8'. That wasn’t quite fast enough to hog the outside lane. Instead, you spent your time straining past lorries and clenching every orifice as their bow-waves tried to force you off the road.

The Beetle’s mid-1930s air-cooled motor wasn’t really a car engine. It was a generator engine. Many years ago I bought a Type 2 campervan with the hopeful idea of picking up

hundreds of gorgeous Scandinavian hitchhikers. The 1600 lump lurking in a hole at the back seemed incapable of moving the thing along at much above walking pace, so I asked my local grease monkey to stick a new/recon one in. That had a nice shiny look about it, but performance seemed unimproved. Worse still, fuel consumption rose to a regal 18mpg. Outraged, I screamed the van all the way back to the garage at its top speed of 43mph to report my dissatisfaction. ‘18mpg?’, said the man, with an odd faraway look. ‘Wow… that’s really good.’ He meant it, too. It was first-hand proof of the fact that high weight + low horsepower = rubbish.

For a very long time Volkswagen seemed embarrassed by the Beetle, po-facedly referring to it as the Volkswagen 1200, 1300 (or whatever the engine capacity was) right up until 1967, when ‘Der Käfer’ finally crept rather shame-facedly onto the brochures. You can see why. Unless you value a car’s ability to float, or its refusal to let you shut the doors without lowering the windows, the Type 1 Beetle’s only saving graces are its doggedness (which, if you hated driving the thing, was actually a negative) and its build quality (which only boosted the doggedness). Volkswagen had traded in its original ‘peoples’ car’ mission statement for more premium positioning, and the Beetle just didn’t fit in.

None of the replacements that were meant to succeed the Beetle (411, Variant, K70) did, so Volkswagen shrugged its corporate shoulders and went with the flow. With the tooling costs long since amortised, it made some sort of sense to build a few thousand more Beetles in the slightly less particular and, shall we say, more Germanophile countries of central and south America. The Beetle became a popular taxi in Mexico until the government there decreed (not unreasonably) that female passengers were entitled to feel that they could get out without needing the driver’s permission.

That was the last straw: Mexican Beetle production stopped in 2003. You could buy new, fuel-injected Type 1s in the UK right up to that point for around £10k. Last year I was tempted to test drive a late model Mexibug that I found on ebay and was somewhat horrified by the experience. Apart from the coalhole ambience and weird pedal layout, the steering had no self-centring. That is a very peculiar feeling.

Interestingly, the disingenuously named ‘New Beetle’ still carries no Beetle badging. And is it a coincidence that Volkswagen’s British website crashes when you ask it to tell you about this particular model? Even now you get the impression that Volkswagen is only selling the Beetle under sufferance, under accountants’ orders, or perhaps in the vain hope that it may yet achieve Mini or Fiat 500-style cool. Somebody should tell them that flares will never come back.

OP Posts Only

Prev 2 3...8 9 Next

OP Posts Only

Author

Discussion

bencollins

Original Poster

3,558 posts

231 months