I love Beetles. I always have. I’ve mostly just accepted this as a sort of natural law, like how things tend to fall downward or how there are 93 penises on the Bayeux Tapestry. But then I found that our very own gothy British designer Adrian had penned a poison letter announcing his revulsion at the humble little car, liberally seasoned with his usual vitriol, fresh from the bottle. This, of course, shocked me, in the same way that finding one more penis in the Bayeux Tapestry would. I realized that while everyone here at the Autopian is allowed their own automotive opinions, no matter how blighted or misguided, I cannot just let Adrian’s anti-Beetle missive go unanswered. So I’m writing this defense of the Beetle because these cars mean so much to me, and, more importantly, I think the Beetle has more than earned such a defense.
If I’m honest, though, the Beetle doesn’t need me to defend it. It’s the most-produced single car model ever made, with 21.5 million examples built between an absurdly long production run lasting from 1938 to 2003. The Beetle was built in Germany and Brazil and Mexico and Australia and South Africa and Nigeria and Ireland and some other places I’m probably forgetting. The Beetle put people into cars in places and circumstances that no other car would have been able to accommodate, and in the process became arguably the world’s most readily-identifiable car ever. Adrian is free to dislike the Beetle, but the truth is the Beetle doesn’t mind, because the Beetle has too many ardent fans in too many places, and all those people that love this noisy little insect aren’t going to be swayed by someone grousing on the internet, even when that grousing is as well-written as Adrian’s is.
The Beetle isn’t daunted by criticisms. It’s heard most of these complaints for decades, and most of them aren’t really wrong, when it comes down to it. The Beetle is a strange little car, noisy and slow and primitive, milking a design from the age of Zeppelins well into the age of the Internet. But none of those things matter, even the slightest. The Beetle’s flaws and its charms blur together into a beautiful haze, every failing just adding to the considerable character of the car. There really is no more secure car than the Beetle, and I don’t mean that in the safety sense, because, by modern standards, an old air-cooled Beetle is definitely not safe. I mean that in the sense of being the opposite of something that is insecure, because the Beetle has nothing to prove. It has been an underdog from day one, and triumphed, in its own quiet and noisy way, ever since.
The Beetle probably shouldn’t be as much of a triumph as it was, given its origins. Really, it couldn’t have a worse origin story, being summoned into being by one of history’s worst monsters, Adolf Hitler. Hitler didn’t design the Beetle or anything like that, but he demanded a car for the people, arguably one of the only non-terrible ideas he had, and then Ferdinand Porsche consolidated all of the various ideas being played with around Europe at that time of a new kind of small car, one with a rear engine and a streamlined shape, and eventually the KdF-Wagen (Strength-through-Joy car) was born.
The KdF wouldn’t be built for civilian use during the war; instead the Beetle would be adapted to wartime duty, where the first hints of this machine’s incredible versatility would be revealed, as it formed the basis of Germany’s wartime light cars like the Kübelwagen and the amphibious Schwimmwagen.
As a Jew who loves Beetles, you might think the origins of this car would dissuade me from wanting to have anything to do with them, but I think the contrary is true. Think about it: what would piss off Hitler’s ghost more than knowing that Jews like me are out there driving and enjoying his precious KdF-wagens? He’d be livid, soaking his jodhpurs in rage-urine and shrieking NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN while I buzz past him in my yellow Beetle on the way to go to town on some whitefish salad on a bialy, flipping that dead loser the bird as I go by.
The Beetle earned every bit of its success. The reason foreign cars never quite made it in America prior to the Beetle was because, frankly, they weren’t up to the challenge. Driving in America is a very different prospect than driving in Europe. The distances demanded by America would put you into one of several oceans should you attempt a similar drive in Europe. Most European cars of the ’50s weren’t robust enough to go on 12-hour highway-speed road trips. But the Beetle was specifically designed with an under-stressed engine with a short throw and low piston speed; its top speed wasn’t terribly high, but it was the same as its cruising speed, which meant it could haul down long American highways at decent highway speeds all day long, and for a tiny cheap car from the Old Country, this was an achievement.
Plus, when Volkswagen came to America, they had the foresight to set up an incredibly robust dealer network, and stocked those dealers with enough parts to build them, not just repair them. The car was designed to be easy to service from the get-go, and it was.
Engines dropped out of the bottom of the car after taking out four bolts, and some hoses and wires. Fenders could be replaced with 10 bolts. Bumpers were mounted far from the body to take damage before the body did, and were almost be treated as consumables, cheap and easy to replace. This was a car that was forgiving of the human condition and all the unpredictability of the world, and worked with you when things got rough, reacting well to whatever scrambling you could do to keep it going.
The Beetle was the original anti-status car. It was truly classless, meaning that it transcended social strata, being something that your broke friend could drive or a movie star like Paul Newman.
It didn’t change its sorta Art Deco-inspired design that was finalized before America even entered WWII, because why should it? The design worked. Let the Big Three radically redesign their chrome-slathered land barges every year. Does it make those cars better to own or use? Not really. The Beetle was incrementally improved constantly, and never changed for the sake of change. That’s why it became a sort of unofficial universal unit of measurement – it was a constant through time and space, seen and understood by people all over the world.
The Beetle is often thought of as a slow car, but that’s not entirely a fair assessment. In the right contexts, the Beetle proved to be a formidable racer. It was used for rally racing, drag racing, and, when adapted to use some genuinely bonkers rocket engines from Turbonique, could be astoundingly fast:
But where the Beetle really shone in competition was off-road. This humble little everyday commuter car, a car designed to be cheap, basic transportation for people, somehow managed to also be an incredibly capable off-road racer, tackling some of the hardest races in the world like the Baja 1000. There’s still a whole class of off-road racing, Class 11, that is basically stock Beetles, and it’s still going today, decades after Beetles have been common on the roads.
What other economy car can claim something like this? Whole categories of racing based on them? That doesn’t happen. Except for the Beetle. I got to drive a Class 11 car once, and it was an absolute thrill:
And, of course, when it comes to competition chops, let’s not forget that without the Beetle, there would be no Porsche 356, which was essentially an improved Beetle, and then no Porsche 911, and no Porsche as we know it at all, ever.
The Beetle’s ubiquity and unique chassis design that allowed the entire body to be easily removed also birthed the whole kit car industry, and most famously in that category (and fitting in with the discussion of the Beetle’s off-road racing successes) gave the world the Meyers Manx (and all its copycats).
How many other cars have birthed entirely new subsets of the automotive industry? Kit cars were not even remotely as accessible or popular until easy-to-find, adapt, maintain, drive, and register Beetles gave up their chassis to become dune buggies or MG TD look-alikes or crazy wedge-shaped sports cars or sleek little vans or whatever.
Oh! And I just remembered something else! The damn things floated! Without any modifications, Beetles were built so well and their bodies were so air-tight that you could drive them right into a lake or whatever and the car would float, at least for a while. VW even touted this in their ads:
With a little modification, you could get it to float indefinitely, and in some really difficult circumstances, like the open ocean:
Again, what other car, regardless of price or status or anything, could do that?
The Volkswagen Beetle really wasn’t like any other mass-produced car before it, and, when I was growing up, I could tell the Beetle was different, and that absolutely appealed to me. There were all the other cars around me, and then there were Beetles. The Beetles looked different, sounded different, smelled different, and, as I knew from riding around in my dad’s red ’68, felt different to ride in. And I loved that.
Beetles were my gateway drug into interesting cars; it was because the Beetle did everything so differently that I started to become more and more interested in cars in general and soon would devour every book or magazine or placemat that could tell me anything about a car I didn’t know about before. The Beetle is fascinating because for all of its success, it didn’t really set a template for what was to come, like cars like the transverse-engined FWD Mini did. The Beetle was a strange survivor of long-gone way of thinking, a refugee from a future that never happened, a future of rear-engined streamlined cars and airships and skyscrapers connected with skyways and all sorts of other utopian visions of the 1930s.
The Beetle was the one bit of those daydreams that made the jump into reality, and once here, it flourished, even though it was mostly alone. Still, the world embraced this charming, friendly little machine, and gave it a home on its roads and in its culture.
And we can’t ignore the Beetle’s cultural impact; the whole reason Disney cast a Volkswagen as a sentient race car in The Love Bug was because of all the cars that were being considered, which were parked in a Disney parking lot, the Beetle was the only one that people felt the urge to pet, like they would an animal. There is something about the Beetle’s design that is disarming and appealing, a plucky sort of eagerness that tugs at something deep inside us, making us feel warmth and affection for this collection of bent sheet metal, rubber, and glass.
Has any other car appeared on more kid’s clothes or sheets or as toys than the Beetle? I don’t think so. Is there any other car as instantly recognizable as the Beetle? Perhaps the original Jeep, but that’s about it, really. The Beetle transcends the automotive world, and is part of the overall human world, familiar to people who otherwise couldn’t tell a Corvette from a Chevette.
I’m terribly fond of Adrian and all his earnest British crankiness, but he is woefully misguided here. The Volkswagen Beetle is one of the truly great cars of the world, ever, an astoundingly flexible and usable transportation tool for so very many people, in so many places. A tool that came from the worst possible origins and proved itself to be a rugged and willing partner in life, a strangely charming and appealing artifact, one of those works of human hands that transcends everything it was originally intended to be, becoming a marvel of ingenuity and an object of affection.
I’ll always love the Volkswagen Beetle, openly and unashamedly, fully aware of all its many flaws and still smitten, hopelessly and happily.
AITA if I mention that the Rascal is sporting a pancake engine from a Type III?
(proud former owner of a 1970 and 1971 Type III Squareback)
My first car was a green 67, $400. At least it started out in nice shape.
But Dave’s beetle was first, he had a green 65 with a modded 6 volt 1300.
That’s where I learned to drive a stick in a day. He was with his girlfriend, threw me the keys, told me to get lost. So I did, thru the hills of Grand Haven Michigan in the rain.
Chris had the nicest. An orange Super Beetle with EMPI stuff all over it (and heat!).
Mike got this incredible split window 55, stock except for dark green metallic paint. Spent one long night curled up in its back ‘seat’, tripping and listening to the 8-track,
somewhere up around Ludington. I saw imaginary ants doing a Rockette’s bit on the back shelf to Zeppelin. I’m much better now.
Chris had the nicest. An orange Super Beetle with EMPI stuff all over it.
No road, two track, one track, path, or hill was out of bounds.
Just kids. That was quite a time.
Much later came a blue ghia that I never fell out of love with, at least 3 ratty transporters, a hateful UPS brown vanagon, and a shiny red new beetle that did 260,000 miles before it gave up.
These days, VW doesn’t make much that’s interesting to me.
Jason, one other thing about Beetles, if you are from my generation, born in the early 60s, you were raised in a time when a second car was becoming common for middle class families. That second car was often a Beetle. When it was time to learn to drive thru didn’t put you in the nice car, they put you in the cheap little bug. When I ask people my age what they learned to drive in, the bug is a very common answer.
And they were a good car to learn on, a manual with a very low first gear, so slipping the clutch right wasn’t too much of a challenge, steering was light, size manageable.
They also had a unique smell, and when I get in an unrestored car it really triggers memories like a visual never could.
I don’t know that I will ever buy one, but seeing an old bug always brings a smile to my face.
Can I agree with both Adrian and JT somehow? Actually I’d say I used to be on team Adrian in my early life and, while I’m by no means a Beetle lover now, I’ve become a fan of its history, more than the car itself.
But I’ll start with the hate: as a kid growing in the seventies in Brazil, I’ve still witnessed the Beetle being the number one sold car in the local market (actually, a position it held from 1959 to 1982). As a kid who loved cars from a very early age, but also was into science fiction and “futuristic” things, seeing a design from the thirties being the most sold car in the market felt to me that I lived in a place lost in time. Perhaps influenced by my father and uncles, who were also not fond of the air-cooled VWs, I also didn’t like the modern Beetle-based designs such as the Brasilia wagon – I couldn’t get the point of the car having a trunk and a “frunk”, since both of them were not particularly spacious – and the luggage on the back would go on top of the engine? Also, even as a (perhaps grumpy) kid I was appalled by some of quirks of the Beetle design, such as the small, almost upright windshield.
Production of the Beetle was stopped in 1986 – by then VW had a local Golf/Polo mixup called the Gol, which went on to top the bestseller list for almost 20 years. Also, according to Wikipedia, one of the reasons for halting its production was that VW needed the plant space for building the VW Fox, which would be then exported to the US and much maligned ever since (though locally it was a well-liked compact sedan – collectors are particularly fond of the wagon version). However, sometime later, in 1993, we had a wacko president who was complaining that car prices were to high and we needed “peoples’ cars” like the Beetle again. This prompted VW to restart production, but the car, even though receiving a lot of improvements, couldn’t compete anymore. As such, production was halted for good in 1996 (much to my delight, back then).
So, this story would put me clearly in Adrian’s camp, I guess. However, I have to recognize that the Beetle was for many years the right car for this country. Poor roads, long distances and hilly terrain were conditions that favored the Volkswagen, compared to its competitors, specially in the sixties. Also, the car is famous for being easy to repair – the saying goes that you only need a hammer and a piece of wire to fix anything on it. Even recently I read a piece about a particularly hilly city in which people still were very fond of their Beetles due to its rear wheel drive.
Also, I can’t ignore that the car has an intangible charm, which seems to be even more effective on younger people, who have never driven one and therefore don’t know how outdated the experience is. My daughter, who is not a car buff by any means, has even learned the differences among the various generations (some of which have nicknames here, which would take a too long post to explain). She jokes that she’d love to have one, as long as it were an electric conversion …
Lastly, I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning the Mini and the 2CV, perhaps even the Fiat 500, but there’s a car that I’ve actually grown to love, which is perhaps the biggest piece of crap compared to all of them: the Trabant. Even though it represents all that’s wrong in a communist regime (or perhaps also because of it), I really like the little buggers! I even had the chance to drive one and it was fun, even though the brakes are absolutely scary for modern standards. So I completely understand how irrational our relationship with cars can be.
What happened in ’74???
End of production in Wolfsburg.
Probably other stuff, too, but that’s the only relevant one I can recall.
It’s the only different one on the chart.
Nope.
Look at the first few rows vs the later ones, or ’67 vs ’68 & ’89 vs ’90.
’74 looks like it was drawn from the up-close viewpoint through a wide-angle lens.
for some reason, they showed a Super Beetle for ’74, with its bigger, curved windshield and wider front end.
I absolutely love Beetles, but sadly have never managed to own one. Someday. My love of them stems from my crazy AF pilot uncle, who was into Beetles and Corvettes (yes, he’s a little different), and had/has a bunch of both. My OTHER, not nearly as crazy AF pilot uncle is the reason I also love Land Rovers, but he hasn’t owned one in 30 years or more. Those I have had (and still have a Disco I) several of, go figure.
Just a story about the simplicity of VWs. Dad was stationed in Germany during the Korea conflict as a spy and had VW to drive around. Mon was there with him as cover (with me in utero) for who would suspect a pregnant couple of being a spy. They got some time off, so drove the bug to Rome. Somewhere in Italy the starter failed. Got to a repair shop hat had never seen a bug let alone repaired one. They took the starter apart and repaired it having no spare parts. Dad brought home ’51 sunroof with ’49 running gear to San Francisco. The dealer saw it and quickly had it brought it around back as a bumper had been damage during shipping and had cosmolene all over it, so it looked crappy in front of all the new ones. I wish he had kept it long enough for me to remember it. I still have the ’67 squareback I bought in ’78.
Now,if you would make a hit piece on a 69 Chevelle or something to fire up Adrian I think we have an interesting thing going here Jason.
I learned to drive in my mom’s 78 SB convertible (“Push in the clutch!”), which she bought new when she was 39. After getting the build sheet from VW a few years ago, I saw that it rolled off the Osnabrück shop floor on her birthday. I still have the car today.
My ’11 BMW wagon was completed on my birthday too. It was a neat birthday present to get the e-mail from BMW that it was finished. I picked it up in Munich three weeks later. Drove all over Germany and Scandinavia with some friends.
It’s awesome that you still have the car! I very much hope to still have my wagon in another 30 years too – but probably a whole lot easier to keep a Beetle forever (or my ’74 Spitfire that I have owned for almost 30 years).
We need a new DIY-friendly utilitarian mule of a car with bumpers separate from the body work, a simple but durable interior with a few niceties like airbags, bluetooth audio and A/C, and a few body styles available, like a hatchback, wagon and ute. The Ford Maverick is close but no cigar.
I’m curious how far you can get with modern safety standards – I don’t think it’s impossible, but there’s a decent amount of obligated complexity in a modern car, and the challenge would be to package that in a way that still allows for amateur repairs.
Mazda CX30 and Honda Fit are both small but with high safety ratings. Something that size but simply styled and stripped of cosmetic frippery is completely doable. Anyone with a cheap automotive scanner and access to youtube can learn OBD II diagnostics.
I don’t particularly like the Beetle, nor do I have Adrian’s visceral hatred of it. But did I thoroughly enjoy reading both of these stories? You know I did!
Ahh the boho Bentley. Had a 58 bus which was slow and fairly unreliable and by today’s standards a death trap of monumental proportions.
Drove several ‘bugs’ over the years. The things that stick in my mind were the lack of power, brakes, roadholding and handling.
In their favor they were cheap to run, made funny noises, started in the depth of a Saskatchewan January and were a complete laugh to hoon in the snow and could easily be lifted off the top of the snowdrifts they always got stuck on.
I don’t hate them as quite as much as I do Vegas, Pintos, Rabbits and Sirocco’s but anything from the 70’s through to the end of the 90’s was atrocious.
I don’t have a visceral hate like Adrian. Mine is more of a meh on the whole VW empire of excreta.
A friend of mine had a Bug for a long time, and got to experience joys such as the steering wheel coming off while driving and one of the back wheels opting to take a highway off-ramp while the rest of the car kept going. He had this thing for over a decade and always repaired it. Finally one year I visit and there’s a Civic in the driveway – surprised, I asked “oh, what finally made you replace the bug?” He looked at me incredulously and said, “Roofless, it was a death trap.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to that.
I cannot fathom how bad it had to have gotten to make him change it, mind boggling.
I rode along on a Super Beetle test drive my best friend’s dad was taking when they first came out so 1970? I’m not a VW expert. We went on a rough dirt road, and I was pretty impressed about how well it absorbed the bumps. His dad was kind of quirky and ended up buying an AMC Gremlin instead. And put a Mack Truck bulldog ornament on the hood.
He also ordered and bought a ’68 Buick Sport Wagon for his wife to drive. Special ordered with a three on the tree manual transmission, which she drove smoothly, but around a town that one end to the other had maybe three feet of elevation change.
I’ve gotten the feeling, from what I’ve read, the pre-Super Beetle’s front suspension was more adept with challenging terrain, but I really don’t know.
I’d definitely pick a Beetle or Super Beetle over a Gremlin every day of the year. Even during a Leap Year.
I did a similar test drive in a SAAB 99 in ’78 and bought a lightly used ’71 Peugeot in ’79 and both were incredibly better on horribly rutted dirt roads (that had been muddy roads a few months before). But they were also far more expensive than VW’s offerings.
As my username and avatar might suggest, I’m solidly in your camp on this one, Jason. An excellent bit of writing, and what I would consider to be a much more compelling piece than Adrian’s (as much as I tend to enjoy his writing). You’re clearly on the right side of history here.
I can see both sides of the argument as former owner operator mechanic of a 1973, painted bi color and with 1963 fenders. Loved that shit before I knew it was called backdating. And then driving it in the winter, the exhaust fumes seeping inside and the dangerous understeer. But I do have fond memories of the POS.
Man, I love the Autopians.
“A drop of daydream that make it to our reality and thrived, even if it was alone.”
Damn, Torch, that was beautiful. Thanks.
Jason’s article is not a rebuttal, but a re-Beetle.
Thanks, I’ll see myself out.
It would appear that Adrian’s article bugged Jason.
As Adrian wrote, “It’s almost like we planned it.”
His British level of sarcasm cracks me up. I worked with a number of British colleagues in the software/IT part of my career, and I always appreciated their wit and humor/humour. Probably annoys the F out of Adrian that the spelling checker on this site prefers US English spellings of words like humor and color over the Commonwealth’s English. Probably others as well.
My take is that it was totally planned. And worked as I have read both articles all the way through and all the comments.
And Jason’s writing also fascinates me and incites laughter.
What a great set of writers! Across the board. Mercedes’ deep dives educate me and fill my head with sometimes useless knowledge, but I appreciate the deep dives and rabbit holes she goes down for her stuff. Matt and Dave are amazing as well.
I love this site!
It was totally planned, however my idea of timely writing and Jason’s idea of timely writing are in completely different solar systems. All I’m going to say is, I know how Matt feels.
Ha!
This feels like a mini-Tales from the Slack, where we get to get a glimpse of how the sausage is made. I admire and enjoy the writing of all three of you. And, of course, the site as a whole.
Matt’s role feels like when I had to manage about 10 specialized IT guys. Herding cats was a term that often came to mind.
But you didn’t address the spelling check part of the comment. Maybe you are less easily annoyed than I am (I doubt it). The little red and blue squiggly lines under words and phrases get annoying, but for me, at least, it’s usually correct. And the fact that Autopian gets flagged every time I type it cracks me up. The software I worked with had a custom dictionary that would let defined words not get called out.
And thanks for the reply. Keep being you.
My first car, in 1977, was the family 1967 Beetle. I promptly blew it up, which meant I bought a copy of The Book and rebuilt it myself at 18 while I was going to engineering school.
It planted what my wife calls “Volkswagen disease” in my head, which led to 45 years of BMW boxer motorcycle ownership, then a Boxster. When I saw my first BMW airhead, I immediately knew how it worked, courtesy of my Bug.
My wife calls it Volkswagen Disease, but I think my first bug is responsible for my “boxer motor disease”.
But I’ve never liked Subarus, and I’m not sure why. I should, but I just don’t.
Lately, I’ve had a really bad desire for a Ghia…
And it can survive the onslaught of both mold demons and chlorofiends.
I don’t have the most experience driving classic cars, but I have ridden in cars from the 50s, 60s, and 70s and gotten to drive a late 60s Beetle and was surprised by how modern it felt in comparison. I took the Beetle on the freeway and kept up with traffic (65mph) in relative comfort.
I feel similarly about the Fiat 124, compared to every Triumph I have test driven the Fiat is a spaceship.
I had a freshman (freshwoman, actually) college classmate who had a 124. It was a couple of years newer than my Datsun ’68 510. Its interior just felt so much more stylish.
My (now 19 year old) son wanted a Beetle ever since he first saw Bumblebee-my father of course had a couple of Beetles in the 60s and 70s and I always had a soft spot for the little things. We picked up a ’72 (of course yellow) Bug in the beginnings of the pandemic in early 2020 and it took him all the way through high school-his permit, driver’s license, and first girlfriend. He is now a VW loyalist, having bought a ’17 GTI last year. From a purely historical and iconic perspective there aren’t many vehicles that meant so much to so many people throughout the world (we even made it to Autostadt last year to honor the marque). Great article Jason