Why I Love The VW Beetle – A Rebuttal

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.