I hate Beetles. That felt so good, I’m going to say it again. Beetles. I hate them. There. That was so cathartic I need a cigarette. Look, I can’t help being the pantomime villain around here. It’s why The Autopian hired me. Every great American cultural enterprise needs an evil mustache-twirling Brit chewing the literary scenery to elevate it above the horde, and it’s the role I was born to play.
Disliking Beetles (as opposed to The Beatles, whom I also hate) feels like an indefensible stance, unlike say, hating celery or the New England Patriots. Both are completely reasonable positions, and should you put them to a normal person, they’ll shrug their shoulders, agree with you, and get on with the rest of their day. Hating the single best-selling model of car ever made with legions of adoring fans speaks to a raging schism at the very core of my being. VW sold twenty-one and a half million of the bloody things, so that’s a lot of happy Beetle owners versus me. Maybe I’m a fundamentally broken person with a penchant for impossible odds.
My intense loathing for them is irrational, the purest kind of hatred. It just exists without explanation. It insists upon itself. Hating Beetles reminds me of being eight years old and being filled with the overwhelming urge to punch that pathetic kid in school who constantly forgot his gym kit and kept wetting himself. Picking on the Beetle is a new low, even for me. I started therapy recently, so let’s indulge in some here and see if we can figure out why I’m feeling these unfamiliar human emotions.
I Just Can’t Find Anything Redeeming About Them
Before we begin, I want to explain how I approach this tawdry business of writing about cars and car design. I try to cast out my own preconceptions and biases and figure out what’s important to the person who might be buying a particular car. It’s more nuanced than just saying a car is good or bad. There are no truly bad cars anymore. What’s important is whether a car works for its intended purpose and how it might fit into your life. When I’m wearing my car designer Fedora, I should be able to parse out the form and content of a car and place it in historical context. Why does this car exist in the form that it does? What circumstances led to its creation? What were the economic, engineering, or societal factors that influenced its final design? What I’m saying is I should be able to remove my visceral dislike of the ass engined Nazi staff car and dispassionately find something about it I can champion. Or at least construct into a two-thousand-word argument I can get paid for. But when it comes to the Beetle, I just can’t. It’s beyond my dubious talent as a writer and outside my makeup as a human being to say anything good about them without metaphorically crossing my fingers behind my back. I can’t do it.
The first memories I have of the crappy little things are from when I was young. My squishy and underdeveloped child brain couldn’t understand why Beetles didn’t look like any other car on the road. I knew they were called Volkswagens because I could read the badges on the back, and in my paltry collection of diecasts was a miniature souped-up version – number 31 in the Matchbox 1-75 range toy car fans. Pushing it around the seventies brown carpet the usual brum brum little car noises I made weren’t right because Beetles made an annoying ring-a-ding sound from their assholes that sounded like nothing else on the road. In my tiny head, Beetles were simply wrong at being a car. In time-honored working-class east London fashion, my bastard stepfather was a part-time kerbside cowboy mechanic for friends. One of his regular customers owned an orange Beetle 1303S. Apparently this was some sort of special and rare Beetle, which sounds like an oxymoron if ever I typed one. All I knew was it kept him in cash-in-hand work because it was always breaking down, and one night it caught fire. It’s possible he was as bad a mechanic as he was a father.
Clearly I’m transposing the trauma of my childhood onto the poor Beetle, and that’s why I can’t stand them. Except I don’t believe for one second that’s the case. It was all a very long time ago, and those scars , while still visible, have mostly healed over. But my passionate loathing for Beetles continues to rage unabated. My mate Beer Boy is big into drag racing. He’s always sending me pictures of Volkswagens that have gone all manner of wild transformation in the name of getting down the quarter mile as fast as possible, and no amount of alcohol injection or candy flake paint is going to change the fact that my reaction to these cars is that they are extremely stupid. He reminisced about owning a 400bhp Beetle that regularly caught other cars unawares. My reply to that was Beetles are so slow it takes 400bhp to make one move like a 200bhp car. They’re performance sucking vortex – gas goes in and that stupid spanners in a tumble dryer engine note is the only thing that comes out.
Man Of The People Doesn’t Like People’s Car
Putting a Beetle next to other drag machines is unfair. Let’s compare it to its contemporaries, the other classic post-war people’s cars. Despite all the grasping pretention and high-minded hot air I expel here I am very much homo populi. When the collapse comes, I’ll be joining my brothers and sisters around the brazier as we attempt to barbecue the last non-radioactive rat, not sitting in an ivory spaceship awaiting lift off to Mars. People’s cars are very close to my heart. Minis have a classless, bulldog puppy charm I’m slowly warming to. In true pretentious wanker fashion I can see myself writing a travelogue about waxing across the dunes of North Africa in a Renault 4. Although it’s a close run thing, the Fiat 500 is more appealing to me than Sophia Loren tumbling out of the kitchen with a plate of spaghetti, although admittedly, as classic transport, their total lack of speed renders them suitable only for local coffee runs.
Although notionally post-war cars, both the Beetle and the Citroen 2CV crucially had their engineering laid out pre-war. They both had compact space-saving torsion bar suspension, air-cooled boxer engines on the driven axle, and a platform chassis that facilitated the bolting on of alternate bodies. Like the Beetle, the 2CV also enjoyed an extended, decades-long production run – it didn’t leave the UK market until 1990. The 2CV is a French Beetle built the right way around. They’re a bit lentil soup and too much this week’s auto-journo fad for me, but I don’t viscerally despise 2CVs in the same way I do la Coccinelle. Let me put it this way – if you said you had a 2CV outside, I’d want a go. You’d have to force me into the driver’s seat of a Beetle at gunpoint – and it isn’t because the 2CV is French and the VW is German. Give me the choice of anywhere to live in Europe, and Germany would be top of the list. I would say Norway because it’s stunning and I have dear friends there, but have you seen what it costs to get a drink in Oslo? I’d be broke before I was plastered. Nope, it’s the land of currywurst, breakfast beer, unrestricted autobahns, and a thriving goth scene for me.
So it’s not nostalgia, the Beetle’s proletarian nature or its nationality that’s repelling me from them, nor the fact that they are epically slow. Despite my disparagement, the Beetle was designed around a clear set of Modernist design ideas. Although initially conceived by the world’s worst art school failure, it was designed by one of the greatest automotive minds of the time, Ferdinand Porsche. He had help forming the Beetle’s distinctive shape from aerodynamicist Paul Jaray and more than a little influence from Tatra, and, really, a whole set of other automotive engineers of the time. The ethos behind its creation was the ‘motorization of the German people’. According to ‘Fifty Cars That Changed The World’:
“Nevertheless, the Beetle was conceived, all at once, as a single integrated engineering solution with no ‘ad hoc’ solutions or ‘legacy’ components from earlier models. The body structure was superb, rigid, watertight and corrosion-resistant, and the quality of the mechanical parts was unusually high for a popular car. Germany’s preeminence in electromechanical engineering also meant that the electrical equipment (starter motor, ignition equipment and dynamo), often the Achilles’ heel of most budget cars at the time, was excellent, so a Beetle always started on cold, damp mornings. The VW’s success was a triumph of good engineering over questionable chassis design.”
Nobody Wanted To Build It
When the dust settled after the war most manufacturers had to resort to what they had been selling back in 1939. So in 1946 when the Beetle appeared it did have some advantages over the pre-war crocks everybody else was peddling. At the end of hostilities Wolfsburg came under British control and the British government tried to get domestic manufacturers interested in the weird device by giving away the car and the factory for nothing. Even at that bargain price, according to The Guardian Lord Rootes dismissed the Beetle for being too ugly and too noisy. I know how he felt. Eventually the British gave up trying to fob VW off and dumped it in the hands of Heinz Nordhoff, an ex-Opel director.
By the time the Fiat 600 and Mini appeared in 1955 and 1959 respectively the Beetle, in Europe at least, was starting to look pathetically out of date. But in the United States it became a protest vehicle driven by the sort of people who use plants for both eating and bathing. The Beetle’s simple ass-backwards engineering and homespun thriftiness was turned into a virtue against the conspicuously consumptive boats Harley Earl was designing. It achieved this counter-cultural sleight of hand with the help of a genuinely groundbreaking advertising campaign. Now I’m a sucker for a good advert and consider the best work to be high art as much as the next art school skin chimney but even those Doyle Dane Bernbach spots are not winning me over.
Over sixty-five years of production, VW did incrementally improve the car, introducing minor updates every year – far more than Citroen did with the 2CV or BMC et al did with the Mini. But the Volkswagen was conceptually still the same little obstreperous motorized saucepan lid in 2003 that it was in 1938. If longevity was a characteristic to be celebrated I laid out a particularly long turd down the U-bend this morning and I don’t see that appearing on t-shirts, having models made of it or celebratory parties being thrown with thousands of unwashed trust fund radicals in attendance. A Beetle is all the most miserable and undesirable things you don’t want in a car: they’re slow. They’re heroically ugly. They’re noisy. They have terrible rear suspension. The essentially similar 2CV at least has joie de vivre about it, a sense of Gallic fun epitomized by being on the door handles in a corner at 20 mph. Beetles are just sad sacks of spartan dourness – flaccid body work flopping drooping towards the tarmac and a generally pathetic demeanor, woefully coalesced into a hunchback of concentrated crapiness. There’s not one decent quality in a Beetle that I couldn’t get in another, more preferable car.
Twenty-one point five million Beetles. Think of all the congestion that could be eased and human hearing saved by destroying them all. The roads would be freer, quieter, and the world a much more beautiful place. Just leave me one chassis please, so when time and resources allow, I can build a goth Meyers Manx beach buggy. It doesn’t matter what year. They’re all the same damn car.
“homo populi” is the most beautifully self-defeating phrase I’ve ever heard.
Ha I never considered it like that.
I crewed for the Huebbe Brother’s rally team a few times and had to wrench on their heavily modified 70 Bettle rally car. I hated that thing, especially having to drive it.
The only redeeming quality of a beetle when they were new is they were dirt cheap. That car would have been $1,839 in 1970, or $14,776 in today’s money.
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