VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE

Volkswagen Beetle

Volkswagen Beetle

Introduction

The VW Beetle is one of the cars that have been in the market since 1938. Volkswagen AG produced car model and until June 2002, it sold over 21.5 million copies of the best-selling automobile in the world before him, the VW Golf surpassed.

The New York Times used the word bug on 3 July 1938 in an article possibly for the first time, the vision of "thousands and thousands of shiny little beetles that soon the German motorways will inhabit 'imagined. Officially, the car was, however, “KdF-Wagen" (Copping & Cservenka, 2005, pp. 121-129).

After the car early 1950s, with growing success in the United States and exported as an affordable, robust and economical use car was one of the most ??popular car that became established there by the mocking-intentioned lovingly nicknamed "Beetle" or "bug" a. In Germany, generally, the word "bug" used only to distinguish the 1961 appearing notchback model VW 1500 (Type 3). Only in the second half of the 1960s, when with Herbie, a Love Bug, the car became a movie star, was taken over by the Volkswagen Group in Germany, since than the common name for its advertising campaigns was beetle. If you said in 1960, like driving a Volkswagen, was clear to everyone that the guy was a mean, for the Volkswagen factory built except for the VW Bus (Type 2) no more different model.

Discussion

Development

The origins of the VW Beetle from statutory aspirations of Nazi Germany to the creation of affordable car for many levels of "Volkswagen", the time KdF-Wagen called back, it played a major role in the development of Ferdinand Porsche, who is generally referred to as the creator of the Beetle. The idea of a "car" is older in its basic features, but its development as the Nazi era was the revolution in the car manufacturing industry.

The KdF-Wagen was before the war no longer produced in series, it founded in May 1938 because the Volkswagen plant in Fallersleben (now a suburb of Wolfsburg) was not finished yet. In the Second World War, there were military vehicles and other military equipment made ??so that the standard could begin production of the then-called Volkswagen car until the summer of 1945. By the end of 1945, 1785 cars produced and delivered to the occupying powers and the German Post. From 1946 the VW with warrant be purchased at a price of 5,000 Reichsmark and private (equivalent to today's equivalent of 16,000 €).

With the export to the United States and many other countries and as a result of the so-called German economic miracle, the Volkswagen stands symbolically. VW reached the Beetle production at Wolfsburg and numerous manufacturing and assembly plants around the world by unimagined heights. In the United States to Germany - VW's most important market was the United States (Hiott, 2012, pp. 101-110) - the Beetle became cheap, fuel-efficient vehicle by local terms, but above all as an embodiment of a "counterculture" to the street cruisers in the 1960's popularity. In the early 1970s, VW was on the heel, because the beetles had received increasing competition from more modern small cars.

With the start of production of the Successor Volkswagen Golf ended the Beetle production at Wolfsburg mid-1974, the Emden plant continued to build the Beetle sedan until the beginning of 1978. However, Beetle was only manufactured in Mexico and Brazil and made ??available ...