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The descendents of Ferdinand Porsche might want to see if any of those prizes for the creation of a perpetual motion device are still outstanding. In the Beetle (or Bug), he created a car that survived the Nazis, the fifties, and Ralph Nader. If not a prize, that achievement at least has to be worthy of some kind of recognition. To call him the car's "inventor," however, might be pushing it.
As British automotive journalist Phil Patton explains in his engaging new book, Bug: The Stranger Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile (Simon & Schuster), it's a miracle that the car got off the ground in the first place. It was conceived of and championed by Hitler (and engineered by Porsche) as "the people's car" over and against German auto manufacturers, who carped at his unrealistic price ceiling of 1,000 marks, and its production was delayed by the war.
After the Bug was put into production in the postwar years, it had to find some way to surmount its tarnished past. Patton reminds us that the first two salesmen that Volkswagen hired to sell it in the U.S. failed utterly. People were just not interested in a funny little German car that You Know Who had dreamed up.
In fact, it was only about a decade after World War II had ended and people had settled back into their lives that the little car began to catch the American public's fancy. At first it began to be "discovered by word of mouth, like a good restaurant" but, seeing the growing interest and growing sales, then-VW boss Carl Hahn decided to try to goose sales by hiring an upstart Jewish public relations firm by the name of Doyle Dane Bernach (DDB). While their ethnicity was no doubt a factor in VW's choosing them—Patton argues that hiring "Jews to sell Hitler's car brilliantly disarmed its greatest liability"—the marketers at DDB had a different approach than most of their contemporaries. This would prove a godsend for the car and its manufacturer.
DDB's campaign sold the Bug as a way of life at odds with the striving fifties and early sixties. It adopted the slogan "small is beautiful" as a slap in the face to the ever-larger U.S.-made cars and presented the Beetle as an "honest car" that wouldn't go out of style because it transcended style. The advertisements consistently portrayed the Bug as unchanging, in spite of the many mechanical improvements that were being made along the way—thus fulfilling Hitler's demand that the car should draw its design from the efficiency of nature itself.
The implications of this campaign were not lost on the counter-culture of the late sixties and early seventies. The Bug and its close cousin, the VW bus, became a smart statement against the supposed crass materialism of the older generation and a badge of baby-boomer identity. By the time Ralph Nader's puritanical auto-safety crusade bore fruit in the mid-seventies (the last year the classic bug was on the American market was 1978), the vehicle was already well entrenched in the American cultural landscape. Disney made a series of Herbie the Love Bug movies. In California, the vehicle spawned multiple mutations, including the Dune Buggy, the vehicle of choice for Charles Manson's famous cult. A generation of strife and bruised arms has resulted from that barbaric game Slug Bug.
I emphasize the American market not to slight the many other nations that have hosted the Beetle, but because it is here that the Bug has achieved an unparalleled, almost cult-like, following. Bug owners in the U.S. continue to acquire the rolling fossils and to spend thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of man hours restoring and remodeling them and displaying them at shows.
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