 Washington Post Thursday, September 26, 2002 - Page C01 The Loved Bug: When the Beetle Was in Flower 'Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile' by Phil Patton By Jonathan Yardley Partisans of the Model T surely would beg to differ, but Phil Patton probably is right that the Volkswagen Beetle is "the world's most famous automobile." Sheer numbers have much to do with the explanation: Since the first Bug was manufactured in Nazi Germany in 1941, more than 22 million have followed, more than any other model from any other manufacturer -- but so, too, do legend and mythology. The original Bug was more than a car; it was an experience. As Patton says, if you were relatively young and at least moderately hip during the two decades beginning in the late 1950s, the Bug's heyday, you almost certainly have sharp and lasting memories of it. I have a couple. The first is of learning to drive a stick-shift on a VW during the summer of 1960, an otherwise wasted vacation spent door-to-door selling -- or, more accurately, not selling -- encyclopedias. The other is vastly less pleasant -- the sight of two corpses upright in the front seat of a VW that had been mashed on U.S. 1 a few miles north of Key West -- but equally instructive, as a reminder that however cute the original Bug may have been, it was almost unimaginably unsafe. Original Bug, that is, because the last of the familiar Beetles was sold in this country nearly a quarter-century ago; the New Beetle that was introduced here in 1998 is by most accounts a terrific little car, but mechanically and technologically it is so much more sophisticated than its predecessor as to be a distant relative at best, similar on the outside but almost entirely different on the inside. Patton's focus in this informal history of the Beetle is primarily on the original, as it should be, but includes a detailed account of the conception and production of the New Beetle. Because Patton knows a lot about cars, "Bug" is informative and occasionally perceptive; because he knows a good deal less about how to write fluid prose, reading it falls considerably short of joy. But the balance tilts in his favor, because he's brought together a lot of detail about a car -- a cultural artifact, if you insist -- that a lot of us still care about, however irrational that may seem. If the car's history embraces many "strange mutations," as Patton's subtitle puts it, that's probably because its origins are strange. Unpleasant though it may be for the Beetle's admirers to admit, the car was Adolf Hitler's brainchild. Not merely did Hitler charge Ferdinand Porsche with the task of designing and producing a "people's car" -- "able to hold a family of five, he said . . . and maintain a steady speed of 80 kilometers per hour, or between 40 and 50 miles per hour" -- but he also insisted that "it should look like a beetle," because "you need only observe nature to know how to achieve streamlining." Only a few of the cars were built during Hitler's regime -- the Volkswagen plant was used mainly for military production during World War II -- and although production got underway in earnest at war's end, the Beetle's initial prospects weren't great. In time, though, the Allies recognized that "the need for a strong ally against the Soviet Union and East Germany required the restoration of . . . German industry," so they got behind production of the noisy little car: "The Bug became a weapon in the Cold War." That was in the 1940s. Not until a decade later did the VW begin to make a dent in the American market. Sales in this country rose from 2,000 in 1953 to 150,000 in 1959, then took off in the 1960s as the brilliant "Small Is Beautiful" ad campaign dreamed up by Doyle Dane Bernbach brought the young and the cool into VW showrooms. The Bug became the counterculture's vehicle of choice, at least until the VW Bus came along. "In the U.S., the bus became a sort of generic transportation, the simplest cheapest box to move more people than the Bug. Self-described members of the counterculture drove the Bug and the bus with the same attitude with which they wore old army jackets and carried army backpacks and gas mask bags with peace signs drawn on them in Magic Marker. They were like guerrillas who had captured the weapons and materiel of the enemy. After all, they believed they were living in the heart of the beast, Amerika, a fascist regime." But hip though they may have been, they were American at heart, and in time VW lost touch with the American market. In the '60s and early '70s, it "refused to bring in automatic transmissions and larger engines," it ignored the pleas of dealers and customers for mechanical improvements, and it paid no attention to safety issues raised by Ralph Nader and others. By 1979 the Bug was history, if not toast. Various other VWs followed it -- the Rabbit, the early Jetta and Passat -- but quality too often was poor, repairs were expensive, and by 1993 total VW sales in the United States had fallen below 50,000 cars. That the company has recovered so emphatically since then is attributable to a couple of influences. One is Audi, which took over management of VW and turned bad cars into good ones; the Golf, the Jetta and the Passat now regularly score high points with the auto press, a development that has translated into healthy sales and loyal owners. The other is the New Beetle, "a pricey, stylish personal car" that evokes retro memories of "a simpler, more optimistic time" while performing up to the standards of the present: "More power, less flower," in the words of one of the many clever ads on its behalf, or "0 to 60 -- yes." More than just a car, more than just an experience, the Bug was also a huge influence on the global auto industry. It forced American manufacturers to come up with competition -- though most of the compacts and subcompacts that rolled out of Detroit were sorry competition indeed -- and inspired the Japanese to produce genuinely serious competition, small cars "with greater or equal economy and durability . . . manufactured in a new, more efficient way." The Bug never truly became the "people's car," but millions of people drive cars that were shaped -- indeed, transformed -- by it. © 2002 The Washington Post Company |
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