 Wall Street Journal October 18, 2002 By Robert Cumberford WHEN THE lavish General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., opened in 1955, the Gm styling-staff parking lot revealed an eyebrow-raising anomaly. Scattered among the multi-colored befinned chrome chariots of the time were a dozen or so tiny Volkswagens, every one of them owned by young designers who had been hired I shape the future. And so they did, eventually, although it took a long while for Detroit's executives to yield to the smaller is better principles that the designers grasped early on. But it wasn't just the smallness. The Bug, as it was called--or Beetle, as some preferred--was easy to maneuver. Its rounded shape set it apart from other cars, and its dip-paint exterior gave it an appealing, porcelain-like finish. It was well made, too, but not by Detroit. The Bug had begun as Adolph Hitler's "Strength Through Joy" dream car from the late 1930s, aimed at the German working class. Volkswagen, its maker, began exporting the car after the war, but slowly. By 1955, when the GM cent! opened, Volkswagen had made just a million cars. That pace would soon change. By 1970, Americans were buying the little cars at the rate of a half-million a yea and the familiar rounded shape was accepted as part of the American way of life, placed there as much by clever advertising as by mechanical virtue. The advertising is the subject of "Getting the Bugs Out," David Kiley's comprehensive account of the car's American marketing. Mr. Kiley notes a crucial early turning point, when Doyle Dane Bernbach took over the Volkswagen al count (in 1959). The print ads it came u with were "different in tone and tenor from other glossy car ads of the time featuring undoctored photos of a reliable, unpretentious car-and, nearby coy and witty captionlike headlines such as, famously, "Think Small" or, under a engine-boiling-over Bug, "Impossible. The low price got attention, too: "Live below your means," read one ad. Television, naturally, only added to the possibilities. In one famous spot, a VW surge through a snowy winter landscape, with the voiceover asking:, "Have you ever wondered how the man who drives the snow- plow drives to the snowplow?" The plucky car made it into Disney movies and onto college campuses. Amazingly, though, by the late 1970s the Bug had disappeared from American showrooms. It was done in by competition from Japanese models, by a weak dollar, by VW's introduction of the Rab- bit and by a loss of what might simply be called its "vogue moment. " But its aura remained so much a part of the collective consciousness that it was possible-even necessary-to re-create it in the 1990s, when Volkswagen brought the Bug back to the American market in a cleverly modified but still recognizable form, both to provide baby boomers with a talisman of their youth and to revive a moribund car company. The company had come a long way from its origins, and much of the journey is a family story, as we learn in "Bug," Phil Patton's solid, readable history of the car. The man who directed the creation of the VW for Hitler was Ferdinand Porsche, a choleric Austrian who worked for many manufacturers, usually leaving them in a storm of controversy. A giant in automotive history, he had two children, Ferdinand (Ferry) and Louise. His daughter married Anton Piech, who ran the major Volkswagen factory during World War II, using slave labor to produce military goods. Ferry Porsche went on to found the eponymous sports-car company so well known today, while Louise amassed a fortune distributing VW and Porsche cars. The patriarch's grandchild Ferdinand Piech is a billionaire engineer of astounding ability--certainly beyond that of his grandfather. He recently retired as chairman of the VW Group but remains as head of its supervisory board. That he is often called a psychopath takes nothing away from his rescue of VW in the 1990s, which might well have disappeared without his decisive leadership. It sounds like a German story, and it is. But it didn't have to be- Long ago, Volkswagen could have been British, as its auto works were in the British zone of partitioned Germany after the war. It could have belonged to Henry Ford II, too, who refused it because the company was, he claimed, "not worth a damn." In the end it remained German, but without the American market it is doubtful that VW's sclerotic management in the 1960s-committed as it was to mid-1930s Porsche design precepts-could have sustained the enterprise. And it was Americans who designed the good-looking and charismatic cars that helped VW at critical points in its history. Virgil Exner shaped the Karmann Ghia version of the Bug in the 1950s, which put style and prestige on the Beetle platform. Forty years later, Freeman Thomas and J Mays ("his middle name was Carroll; the J stood for nothing except itself") created the New Beetle when the company's fortunes were at low ebb. The two New Beetle designers, Mr. Patton notes, were in a position to interpret American culture for VW's German executives. And they achieved their goal of "extract[ing] some primal automobile gestalt from the memory of the Beetle." Mr. Pat ton shows how a seemingly frivolous American concept was finally accepted by the stolid German parent company and how it then went on to revitalize sales of the less-striking but far more practical VW Golfs and Jettas. Mr. Patton knows how cars work, and he follows the mental processes of their designers, too. His prose is lively and his account is admirably thorough, although Mr. Kiley's book will naturally provide a fuller account of the advertising campaigns that helped to make the car such a success-when it indeed was a success. Sales of the New Beetle have declined sharply in the years since it was brought to market, but the luster it added to the brand was vital. And both these books give chapter and verse of how that was achieved. Mr. Cumberford, a car designer, is automotive design editor of Automobile magazine. |
Entire website © 2004 Phil Patton