Volkswagen Beetle

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Volkswagen Beetle

The phenomenal success of Volkswagen's diminutive two-door sedan in the American automobile market in the 1950s and 1960s was a classic example of conventional wisdom proven false. Detroit's car manufacturers and their advertising agencies marketed large, comfortable cars with futuristic styling and plenty of extra gadgets. Futuristic rocket fins were in, and the more headlights and tail lights, the better. "Planned obsolescence" was built in: the look and feel of each year's models were to be significantly different from those of the previous year. But throughout the 1950s, there was a persistent niche market in foreign cars, particularly among better-educated drivers who thought that Detroit's cars looked vulgar and silly, and who were appalled by their low mileage. Most European imports got well over 20 miles per gallon to an American automobile's eight. The German manufacturers of the Volkswagen claimed that their "people's car" got 32 miles per gallon at 50 miles an hour. Moreover, it was virtually impossible to tell a 1957 VW from a 1956 one—or indeed, from the 1949 model, of which just two had been imported, by way of Holland. (The first "Transporter" microbus sold in America arrived in 1950.)

To be sure, VW's sedan looked odd—rather like a scarab, which is why it was soon dubbed the "Beetle"—but it worked. Its rear-mounted, air-cooled, four-cylinder 1200-cc engine proved extremely durable, with some owners reporting life spans in the high hundreds of thousands of miles. The cars had been designed so that they could be maintained by the owner, and many of them were, particularly by young owners who bought them used. And the microbus, with the same engine as the Beetle and a body only slightly longer, could hold an entire rock band and its instruments and still climb mountains. (It became so closely associated with the hippie movement that when the leader of the Grateful Dead died, VW ran an ad showing a microbus with a tear falling from its headlight and the headline "Jerry Garcia. 1942-1995.")

Developed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, the car had been ordered by German citizens for the first time in 1938 under the name "KdFWagen" (KdF stood for "Kraft durch Freude," "strength through joy."), but war had broken out the following year, and the factory at Wolfsburg switched over, for the duration, to making a military version, the Kübelwagen ("bucketmobile"), and its amphibious sibling, the Schwimmwagen, until Allied planes bombed operations to a standstill. After the war, VW rebuilt its factory and resumed production, first under the British occupying forces, and subsequently under Heinrich Nordhoff, VW's CEO until his death in 1969.

From their modest beginnings, sales of imported VWs in America grew steadily. In 1955, the company incorporated in the United States as Volkswagen of America. In 1959, it hired a sassy new advertising agency, DDB Needham, which had already raised eyebrows with its "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's Jewish Rye" campaign. DDB's first ad was three columns of dense type explaining the advantages of buying the VW sedan, broken up only by three photos—all of the car.

It soon became apparent that people already knew what the Beetle looked like, and had looked like for 10 years, that it got great mileage, and that it cost less than anything from Detroit ($1545 new in 1959, still only $2000 in 1964). What they needed was a reason to identify with a nonconformist automobile. So DDB switched to ads containing very little copy, a picture of the car, a very short, startling headline in sans-serif type, and a lot of white space. One DDB headline was "Ugly is only skin-deep." Another simply read "Lemon." A third, turning one of Madison Avenue's favorite catchphrases of the day on its head, said "Think Small." Indeed, almost all of DDB's VW ads were the conspicuous antithesis of conventional auto advertising. "Where are they now?" showed 1949 models of six cars, five by companies which had gone out of business in the subsequent decade. In the 1960s, the focus of the campaign shifted to true stories of satisfied customers with unusual angles: the rural couple who bought a VW after the mule died, the priest whose North Dakota mission had a total of 30 Beetles, the Alabama police department which got a VW sedan for its meter patrol.

Although VW lost some of its market share in the 1970s once Detroit, spurred by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, began concentrating on cars that were less ostentatious and got better mileage, the company continued to make Beetles until the end of the decade, when anti-pollution standards were passed which neither the sedan nor the microbus could meet. Although production of Beetles in Germany and the United States ceased in 1978, they still continued to be turned out elsewhere, notably in Mexico, where in 1983 VWs amounted to 30 percent of all motor vehicles made in that country. Meanwhile, restored Beetles in the United States continued to command prices up to $7,000 (still a bargain compared to $15,000 for the cheapest new cars from Detroit) in the early 1990s.

When VW introduced a "concept car" at the Detroit Motor Show looking suspiciously like the old Beetle, response was so enthusiastic that the company went ahead and put its "Concept 1" into production at the same Mexican plant as the VW Golf (and powered by the same water-cooled engine, now under the front hood). The first new Beetles arrived in the United States in 1998 to nostalgic advertising produced by Arnold Communications in Boston in a reprise of the DDB style, but with even less body copy: a picture of the sedan above headlines such as "Roundest car in its class" and "Zero to sixty. Yes." One ad read simply "Think small. Again."

—Nick Humez