1972: Henry Ford finally gets beat. Volkswagen Beetle No. 15,007,034 rolls off the assembly line in Germany, surpassing Ford's venerable Model T as the most highly produced car in history.
By the following year, total production was over 16 million. More than 21.5 million of the little cars would eventually be cranked out.
The Beetle got to be the best-selling car of all time the old-fashioned way: Reliability, sturdiness, dependability and cheap operating cost together with clever advertising campaigns ingrained the VW Beetle so solidly in the public consciousness that even Woody Allen's film Sleeper featured a Beetle, still running after being parked for three centuries.
While it is true that more units of the Toyota Corolla brand have now been sold overall, the Beetle is arguably the world's best-selling car design. From its inception in prewar Nazi Germany, to the present day, the Volkswagen Beetle was produced largely unchanged, while there have been total redesigns of the Corolla, each amounting to a new car design merely sharing the same name.
All this started back in 1933 when Adolf Hitler ordered Ferdinand Porsche (yes, the same Ferdinand Porsche who is much better known for cars of a higher caliber bearing his name) to develop what der Führer termed a people's car, or Volkswagen in German.
The basic requirements set out were that the car should be capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph), and cost 990 Reichsmark ($5,000 to $6,000 in today's money), or about the price of a small motorcycle.
After World War II, the VW manufacturing plant was seized and handed over to the British, so it could be dismantled and shipped to Britain. But British auto manufacturers were too ignorant to realize what they had. "The vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motor car ... it is quite unattractive to the average buyer.... To build the car commercially would be a completely uneconomic enterprise," said the British auto industry. So the Germans got to keep their "quite unattractive" car capabilities.
By the time the Beetle ceased its official production in 2003, the little people's car had lived more than a full life. From being used for frat pranks, to witnessing the Summer of Love, to being the first car for many a driver, even to being drag-raced, run in the Trans Am and the Baja 1000, and having the Formula Vee racing division specifically made for it, there is little the Volkswagen Beetle hasn't done.
Besides having a practical heater.
Photo: Nazi leader Adolf Hitler speaks at the opening ceremony of the Volkswagen car factory in Fallersleben, Germany, May 26, 1938.
Associated Press
See Also:
- Oct. 1, 1908: A Basic Car for the Great Unwashed
- Wired.com Builds DIY Electric Beetle
- Old-School Beetle Runs on Batteries and Biodiesel
- Feb. 20, 1792: U.S. Goes Postal, but It's All Good
- Sept. 22, 1792: Day 1 of Revolutionary Calendar
- Feb. 17, 1818: Proto-Bicycle Gets Things Rolling
- Feb. 17, 1864: We're Sunk
