The Iconic, Complicated VW Beetle

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I guess I should say beep beep and welcome to the podcast.

This is Stuff You Should Know, the love bug of podcasts.

And the reason why is because it features Charles W.

Chuck Wayne Chuck Tran Bryant.

Is it a reference to my first car or just me?

Just you.

You're a love bug.

Oh, okay.

I got you.

Yeah.

Jerry's a love bug, too, but much more insect-like.

This was my first car.

I know.

Is that why you selected this?

Yeah, I mean, I've always had a soft spot for the old VW Beetle.

I had a 68 that my parents bought new in 1968, which, as we'll see, was the year they boomed in the States.

You know?

I do know that.

Yes.

I didn't know if there was more to your story.

No, no, no.

No, I mean, I'm continuing my story.

So, yeah, I just thought that you might react or something.

It's fine.

Then I later had a 75 Super Beetle.

Liar.

And then I had a Squareback, a Type 3 Squareback.

I think it was a 75 as well.

And that was actually my favorite of them all.

I'm not familiar with that last one.

You'd recognize it.

It was sort of a,

it was their version of a station wagon.

Oh, you're talking about the thing.

No, no, no, no.

Thing wasn't a station wagon at all.

No,

I've never seen a Beetle station wagon in my life, dude.

Okay.

Well, I'll send you a picture.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's cool.

I guess it was roomy trunk-wise?

Oh, no, not at all.

It was, you know, about this.

It was probably in the chassis of a beetle, so it wasn't like it was big.

It wasn't like the huge station wagons of its day.

Hmm.

So it was basically just the

shape of it kind of was station wagon-esque.

Yeah.

I'm going to send you a picture right now, buddy.

Please do.

I don't have my phone near me, but I'll pretend I saw it.

Okay.

Have you sent it yet?

Not yet.

Just say, oh, my God.

I have seen one of those.

Okay.

Tell me when you sent it.

Well, just continue because it's taking longer than I thought.

Okay.

I have a riddle for you, Charles.

Okay.

What do the foreign words babel, cosinel, tortuga, cepito, booba, and vochito all have in common?

Well,

I mean, they're all various names in various countries of the Volkswagen Beetle.

Yeah, that's the long and short of it.

They have nothing else in common except for that.

But that's pretty cute.

All of those names are pretty cute.

And the reason why is because the VW Beetle is a very cute car, which is kind of a strange thing to say.

If we were to go back to the 50s,

old-timey 1950s post-war American suburban dudes would probably beat us up for saying that the Beetle was cute.

They'd say, no, it's an ugly car.

Everybody knows that.

And no one thinks that anymore.

Everyone loves the Beetle.

And that's the end of the podcast.

Yeah.

Good night.

I sent you the picture.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Hold on.

Beep, bop, boop, boop.

Oh, yeah, I've seen one of those before.

They're great.

Well, I look forward to your rear reel and your rear response later.

But I called mine the Type 3.

It was a Type 3 squareback.

But the original name of the VW Beetle was Volkswagen Type 1.

And the Germans themselves kind of renamed it Der Kefer,

K A umlaut F E R, which is Beetle in German.

But Volkswagen, I mean, they kind of just took that name

upon themselves because people were calling it that already.

Yeah, they stole it from Der Volk, Der Volk.

Yeah, the people?

Yeah.

Because it was Der Volk who came up with the name Beetle, like you said, but it was Der Volk for whom the Beetle was created, Chuck, which is the reason why Volkswagen is called Volkswagen.

It means the people's car.

And that is the basis of the entire story of the Beetle.

The whole thing was started off in the 1930s,

championed by no less than Adolf Hitler in Germany.

I mean, where else?

And

the point of the car was to create an affordable car that the average German family could use on the newly built Audubons, which Kraftwerk famously sung about.

and which would also bring the German economy out of the slump that it had been in during the Weimar Republic.

And I don't know if you remember or not, but we talked about the German hyperinflation many times around this time, late 20s, early 30s.

And get this.

There's a stuff you should know listener.

Dave Kousten sent this to us yesterday.

I don't know if you saw, but there's a stuff you should know listener named Scott Seligman.

And he created a...

like a search tool where you can search keywords and it will bring up every stuff you should know episode that we mentioned, say, the word hyperinflation in.

So that's how I know that it was in our episode on currency that we talked about that.

So hats off to Scott Seligman.

Yeah.

Can people use that?

Yeah.

So

the URL is just too kludgy to say out loud.

So I would encourage people, I think he posted it on the stuff you should know subreddit, and that would be a good place to go get it.

You should have made one of those little URL shorteners.

I don't know if that's legal to do that to someone someone else's url

i don't know i thought it was just a way to send out like hey just go to you know keyword s-y-s-k keyword.com or something and it would redirect well yeah i'm not that savage okay so i'm 49 years old for pete's sake uh hey speaking of that and craft work that leads me around to this did you notice that i use craft worked on your stuff you should know birthday post

No, I didn't.

I saw that post.

Thank you very much for it.

It was super sweet.

But no, I didn't notice.

What was the craftwork reference?

Did you?

No, I had the craftwork song playing to the post?

Oh, I know.

Did you have your volume down?

Yeah, I never have my volume up for stuff like that.

Which one?

I got you.

A model?

I don't know.

A model would be appropriate.

I'm not sure which one it was.

I wish it was Autobahn because I'd really bring this thing full circle.

It really would, but still, the Kraftwerk mention,

I'm going to go back and listen to it.

I appreciate that.

I'm going to look at the picture of your station wagon and listen to the Kraftwerk song that you posted for my birthday.

I appreciate that, man.

I mean, it's only a station wagon in the purest sense of the word.

It's more like a stretched hatchback.

It's too late, Chuck.

You really built it up as a station wagon.

You can't backpedal now.

But they also had,

and, you know, this is along the same lines.

Instead of the actual squared back, there was, oh, what did they call it?

Not the round back, or did they?

The green back?

I don't know, but

they had a similar model, except it wasn't as boxy.

It was a little rounded, but it still had the hatchback.

I don't know.

I'm totally lost now.

I know about the Beetle, but that's about it.

All right.

Well, let's keep talking about the Beetle then.

Like you said, the People's Car.

We're going to tell you about the history here because the history is a little complicated.

And I don't mean like, oh, it's complicated because the Nazi Party, you know, commissioned it.

It's complicated because there's a bunch of different people who they borrowed heavily from to kind of make the Beetle.

Hitler, and then there are also, you know, various stories, depending on who you want to listen to, about whose initial idea it was.

Hitler, if he were alive today,

would say that it was his idea, first and foremost, and he picked

Austrian, a gentleman named Ferdinand Porsche,

Porsche,

to design the first Volkswagen,

and that Porsche came up with that iconic shape, you know, that round looking, weird looking car for the time.

I mean, we're so used to him now because it's literally the best-selling car of all time by a long shot that everyone's like, no, it doesn't look weird.

It looks like a Beetle.

But back then, it looked very strange.

It did.

And that was essentially the end of the story.

Ferdinand Porsche came up with the design.

He also came up with the

Beatles' iconic characteristics, which is that the engine is in the rear.

Yeah.

It's air-cooled, which saves on space.

You don't have all those tubes or whatever for a water,

liquid-fueled or cooled engine.

And that it had rear-wheel drive.

So essentially, the Beetle was created whole out of

the first time out of the gate by Ferdinand Porsche under orders essentially from Adolf Hitler.

That's like the story that most people know.

Even Volkswagen's like, yeah, that's not quite right.

There's some other details in there that are a little different.

And yet they still give all credit to Ferdinand Porsche, which, as we'll see, is misplaced

really if you drill down into it.

Yeah, supposedly it could fit four adults.

That's the party line.

Well, I guess that's really not the right thing to say there, although it was the Nazi party.

Yeah.

But you know what I mean.

It's just an expression.

Sure.

But two adults in that back

have to be pretty small adults.

The back seat didn't have a lot of room.

It didn't go super fast, but it could top 60 miles an hour.

At the 1934 International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition in Berlin,

Hitler came up on stage, gave a speech,

basically saying that, you know, I have called for the creation of this car, car of the people, something that would be affordable, something that you can drive on the Audubon, unless you're Jewish, of course, because Jewish people were not allowed to drive on the Audubon.

And the initial price was 990

Reichmarks, not Deutschmarks, but Reichmarks, which was about 31 weeks' salary for the average German worker.

So

not a lot of money, but a lot of money at the time for sure.

For sure, but still affordable, right?

I mean, this is this is it's an unless they made you pay it all at once, then it probably wasn't very affordable.

The point was to make an affordable car for Germany and then also create what almost amounted to a national state-owned

car company, Volkswagen.

And to create both this car and ultimately the company that made the car, Volkswagen, in 1934, the Reich Automotive Industry Association was formed.

And that Reich is kind of a giveaway that the Nazis ran this consortium of

privately owned car manufacturers in Germany, brought them all together and said, Der Führer really would like you guys to get together and make this people's car.

And if not, you will all be summarily shot and so will all of your your family.

I don't know if they said that last part, but I think basically everything that was said in Germany during the 30s had that unspoken attached to the end of it.

Yeah, for sure.

And, you know, just to be clear, because I think I was probably confusing things a little bit, the two versions of that story is one, Hitler said it was his idea,

and then two, Volkswagen said,

no, it was really Porsche's idea to begin with.

Yeah, that Hitler took and ran with it.

Exactly.

But I don't know that he is said to have given Porsche

the credit.

Probably not.

But the upshot of it is that this consortium of German automakers hired Ferdinand Porsche to create and design and create this Volkswagen.

So there's no question about that.

Like the original Volkswagen Beetle was created by Ferdinand Porsche.

What makes this whole story even more convoluted?

You thought that was convoluted, everybody.

Buckle up.

Well, they didn't have seatbelts either.

No.

At least mine didn't.

Hang on to your

oh shoot bar.

Yeah, exactly.

It gets way more convoluted than that because it turns out that Ferdinand Porsche either took credit for a lot of other people's ideas or just over time was given credit.

Kind of like, you know,

the short sketch version of the story.

Most people don't go into this much detail into the story of the VW, but we're stuff you should know.

So we're going to do that.

But there were a few people that kind of along the way contributed to what would become the Beetle Beetle very directly.

It wasn't like, hey, we should make a car and call it the Beetle.

Their ideas were essentially taken and adopted and turned into the Beetle, sometimes like

as a whole.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty blatant when you look at these designs and these sketches and drawings and stuff like that.

The first guy we're going to talk about is Joseph Gans,

who was a Hungarian Jewish engineer.

And he came to Germany after World War I.

And

from almost the beginning of 20th century, I guess it was like 1904, 1905,

people were talking about like a people's car.

You know, motorcycles were the only kind of inexpensive way to get around.

And they thought, hey, if we could get a car that's, you know, not too much more than a motorcycle that could actually hold a few Germans, then we'd be, you know, doing pretty well for ourselves.

And he was a editor of a German car magazine.

So he was, he knew his way around

the idea idea of like an affordable, lightweight, kind of smallish car.

Well, yeah, he also used that position to promote and try to drum up support for the idea of a German people's car in the pages of that magazine, too, which I think was Carr und Driver.

He even went so far as to design a prototype that he actually called the Maycoffer, the May Beetle.

This is 1931.

This is long before the Beetle was even called the Beetle popularly.

And he had, there was another car called the Standard Superior.

Did you see a picture of one of those?

Yeah, I mean, it looks like a Volkswagen Beetle.

Exactly.

And so

apparently that was based on one of Joseph Gonz's patents.

So this guy definitely had a lot of contribution to the development of the Beetle.

And we're talking, I mean, 1931, his Standard Superior was built in 1933.

The Beetle started to start to be built, and I think 1934, 35, 36.

So, this is like, it's not like Ferdinand Porsche was totally unaware of the Standard Superior.

It was a car you could buy in Germany at the time.

So, you might say, well, why was Joseph Gans not credited for this?

Why wasn't he hired instead of Ferdinand Porsche?

Well, he was Jewish, and he was arrested by the Gestapo before the Volkswagen Beetle was ever created, but right before it.

So, it was very easy for Ferdinand Porsche to be like, Joseph, who?

These are my ideas.

Yeah, exactly.

He was arrested in 33 and fled the country in 34, and that was kind of it.

He never got any kind of compensation or anything, or any recognition either, even, except for, I mean, us and other people on the internet, I guess.

Sure.

And that's what counts, right?

Yeah.

The second guy we're going to talk about, another Hungarian engineer.

I don't know what the little accents mean as far as

pronunciation goes in Hungarian, but I'm just going to say Bela Barinyi.

Okay.

Good enough?

Sure.

All right.

So he also wanted to build like a people's car, sort of a small, inexpensive thing.

This was like, he was a kid.

He was a teenager in the mid-1920s when he came up with an idea for a rear-wheel-drived, rear-engine, air-cooled engine.

And if you look at the sketch that he set out in 1925, and this is what, eight years before the

standard Superior, even, this thing looks a lot like a Volkswagen Beetle.

Oh, yeah.

The chassis is exactly the same, essentially.

And then even the body, he drew like a side view of the car, and it's a Beetle.

I mean, like, he's creating this in 1925, like you said, as an 18-year-old.

And this one is so

irrefutable that in the 50s, he apparently sued Volkswagen, and they said, okay, from now on, we will refer to you as the intellectual father of the Beetle, because you definitely laid down all the stuff that later became the Beetle, even though you weren't given credit at the time.

Yeah.

And he was like, Does a check come along with that title?

And they said, nine.

Yeah, they probably did.

It's interesting, though, if you look at the,

I'm getting confused now.

I think the standard superior is the one that looked like a beetle, except the front end had a little kind of squared off center.

I'm not sure about the front end and all the squared off business, but I do know that the lines were more

angled

rather than

rounded.

Yeah, I think that's the one I was thinking of.

Like, what it looks like, actually, is people,

VW Beetles are highly,

have always been highly modifiable as far as people making them look, and as we'll see later, like Dunebuggies or like this or that.

And one of the kind of, I never really liked them that much, but one of the kind of fun things you could do with the Beetle was put a little front, squared front end on it instead of that big rounded scoop,

It, you know, a square front, like a Model T Ford.

And that was something that people would do to modify their Beatles, and it looks a lot like the standard Superior that way.

Oh, like the hood?

Yeah, yeah.

Turning that.

Yeah, okay.

I gotcha.

I got you.

I wasn't, I'm not up with the jargon and the lingo here.

Like front end.

Yeah.

I don't know.

This front and end thing.

Yeah, yeah.

That's where the beat is.

I think the standard superior, right?

I think the standard superior did have

a squared-off hood, as the way people call it.

I'm a front-ender.

My bad.

And then there was one other guy, too, who was Austrian.

His name was Erwin Kamenda.

And he's the one who actually filed the patent for the body that became the Beetle.

This wasn't like he drew something along the way.

He was working for Porsche.

Porsche produced this design for this car, and the guy who actually drew the design and patented what the car ultimately looked like was a different guy.

Yet, if you just listen to all the stories, essentially, it was Porsche Hitler, Porsche Hitler.

Over time, VW would try to get away from that story a little bit, but it would come back to them.

They had to finally kind of deal with it head on, yeah, as we'll see.

But in the meantime, Chuck, while we wait for VW to reckon with their Nazi past, I say we take a break.

We'll be right back.

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All right.

Earlier you said it was 35, 36 or so.

It was in fact 35 when they delivered the first prototype.

At this point, it was the VW Series 3.

Dave helped us out with this, and he was keen to point out it was made from steel and wood, which sounds weird when you think of a car being made of steel and wood, but back then cars were made of steel and wood generally.

Right.

Yeah.

And this was the prototype, but I think the eventual ones that came out were made of the same stuff.

And if you look at it, it looks like a cross between a Beetle and one of the black cabs in the UK.

Yeah.

Like those things, like one mounted the other, and then the Beetle Series 3 came out.

Sure.

A little fun fact of the podcast.

Hitler never knew how to drive.

He never had a driver's license.

And yet, if you step back, he was like directly in charge or not directly in charge, but he was overseeing this.

Like this, he knew what was going on, maybe not day to day, but generally he was getting updates on the progress of this car and how it was coming.

Like, this was not like he said something at an auto show once, and then from that point on, it was kind of taken over.

Like, he had like some sort of hand in it,

which is just crazy if you think about it.

Because I remember being a teenager and hearing, like, man, you know, like the Volkswagen, it was like a Nazi car, the Beatle was, or something.

Yeah, I was that teenager who owned it at the time, so it was a little bit of a crazy thing.

Okay.

All right.

I was the one throwing eggs at your car, Matro Pet.

Okay.

But, you know,

when you hear those things, like in college or high school or something like that, as you get older, you're like, 98% of that stuff is totally wrong.

It's just off.

It's sometimes just totally untrue.

This is one of those rare ones that is not only true, it's even worse than it seemed in college.

Yeah, you were throwing eggs at my car and sucking down your fan of orange.

Yeah, I was very confused at the time.

Yeah, so in 1938, they built a factory in Stuttgart

to start building this car, like, you know, this tremendous, you know, people's car factory.

The original like off-the-line edition, like for real, finally, was called the Volkswagen Type 38 KDF wagon, big K, big F, little D.

That stood for Kraft dur Freuda,

which is strength through joy, which was a literal Nazi propaganda slogan.

Because you associate joy

with the Nazis, for sure.

So

their plan was, this is 1938, their plan was to

produce 1.5 million of those a year.

That is ambitious in the 1930s, but that's what they were going for.

They ended ended up producing 210.

Not 210,000.

No, 210, 2109er, and that's it.

The reason why, in large part, was because the war broke out in 1939.

The reason the war broke out is because the Nazis started everything.

Yeah.

I just want to make sure no one forgets that.

Yeah, that's true.

And they immediately started sort of

reconfiguring the KDF to suit their military needs.

So they came out with different types, a Type 87,

which was a four-wheel drive, and I guess that German officers would drive that one.

They had a Type 82,

a Kubelwagen, a bucket seat car, and that was armored.

It was on that Beatles, Beatles, like the band, you get it?

It was on a Beatle chassis, but it was armored, and so therefore safe.

And I'm sure some of the higher-ups rode around in that one for obvious reasons.

That one very clearly, to me, became the thing, the VW thing.

Yeah.

I knew one person in high school, Mary Frances Shepard, had a VW thing.

And I thought it was so cool.

Oh, yeah, it was cool.

Especially in high school, it takes some gall to drive such an unusual, cool car.

Yeah, I admit you were.

And a little bit the same with me.

I was the only person with a Beetle in my whole high school because everyone else wanted like a Mazda RX-7 or something.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they also had a modified version of the Type 82 or Type 80, yeah, Type 82 called the Schwimwagen, the Schwimming or swimming car.

And you could drive around in the water with it.

I saw a picture of some dude in his vintage Schwimmwagen, like in the water, and it looks so nerve-wracking.

Like the water, the thing is maybe

eight inches above the water line.

The rest of the car is below the water.

Too close for comfort.

Yeah, way too close for comfort.

Apparently, it went six full miles an hour on the water, and there weren't very many of those made.

So I imagine that that dude probably paid a lot for that.

Yeah, probably so.

And I don't know if you can, I doubt if you can still find one of these, but they had a during the war.

They had some gas shortages, some fuel shortages.

So they developed a wood-burning conversion kit for that Kubelwagen.

So the Bucket Seat car, and I'm sure you looked up pictures of this thing, it had a little round hatch in the front of the car.

What do you call that?

The hood?

Yeah.

And you would open up that hatch like a wood-burning stove and put wood in there to power this thing.

That's how you remember.

It's called the hood.

That's where you put the wood.

Right.

That's right.

That was our slogan.

And that would power the car, not through combustion, but through pyrolysis, where the wood was gasified, and then those gases would be transferred to the pistons to make them go up and down, and then make the wheels on the bus go round and round.

I didn't know, no, that was even possible.

Not the wheels on the bus, but I didn't know that you could use wood in such a way to power a car.

It's kind of cool.

Yeah, and it did work, but it didn't work very well.

And to answer your question, I read some article on it, and the people said that as far as anyone knows, none of those survive.

So you would not be able to find one of those.

Yeah, sadly.

So in the the end, while they were pumping these things out, what they would use was forced labor.

They had, and this is another horrifying fact of the show, there were four literal concentration camps and eight forced labor camps

on the grounds of the Volkswagen factory complex.

And that's just like, that's as, not only was it a Nazi car, like they were exploiting labor to make them.

Yeah, and it gets even worse because Ferdinand Porsche specifically asked for forced labor to be assigned to build the Volkswagens because he wanted to keep costs down.

So you put all this together.

Hitler's directly involved in the creation and manufacture of

this car.

They use slave labor in concentration camps built into the automotive factory complex.

And the reason that they're using slave labor is because the chief designer, Ferdinand Porsche, asked for slave labor.

VW eventually had to like face this.

As the world kind of continued on, people are like, guys, this is, we have to talk about this because this is not okay to just ignore.

Yeah.

I mean, you, you wonder, like, could they literally arrest Ferdinand Porsche for this?

He was held by French authorities at one point, but he was not convicted of a crime.

But in the 90s, I think it was the early 90s, Volkswagen.

started a couple of different payouts.

They paid 12 million German marks, Deutsche Marks, which is about 63 million million bucks today to some of the survivors who were those forced laborers from that factory.

And then about eight years later in 99, Porsche actually set up a fund, even.

They were like, yeah, you know, Volkswagen's taking all the heat on this, but it was really our guy.

So maybe we should pony up some dough.

So they ponied up 5 million Euros, about 10 million bucks today, to compensate some of those same laborers.

Yep.

So remember, they only produced 210 of what became the Beetle, the type 38?

Is that correct?

Yeah, I think that was it.

Or the Series 3, one of the two.

They only produced 210 of those before the war.

During the war, they changed the whole VW factory to a defense vehicle factory.

And then after the war, when they started to get back to business, it was under oversight from the British authorities.

So it actually, in a really weird way, was the Brits who first fully realized Hitler's vision for a people's car for Germany.

Yeah, it was in their occupation zone, so it was kind of theirs, I guess.

They renamed the factory to the Wolfsburg Motor Works because of the Wolfsburg castle that was close by.

And that, you know, that

I don't know if you would recognize it, depends on how much you've been in like these old Beatles and Volkswagens, but

a lot of them like later on would be like the Wolfsburg edition if they had a special edition of a golf or something.

Even I know about that.

Okay, all right, good.

But they would have that little symbol, this little castle with a wolf there in the center of the steering wheel, just sort of an iconic logo.

I haven't seen that.

Yeah, you might recognize it.

Maybe.

Is it on the hood?

I don't know what that is.

So with the Brits, they made 20,000 of those things, 20,000 essentially Beatles in 1946 alone, but all of them were to be used by Allied occupation forces in Germany at the time, right?

So they weren't the people's car yet.

It wasn't, and I think the Brits ran it from 1945 to 49.

In 1949, they finally handed it back over to the West German authorities.

And in the interim, I think 1948, they hired the guy who would essentially be who you could truly call like the real actual father of the VW Beetle, a guy named Heinz Nordhoff, who

took the control of this factory and like ran with it and introduced the Beetle to the world.

Yeah, I mean, he, he really ramped up production.

Uh, he was a very experienced car maker.

Uh, he made the car a little better.

He, um, I think gave it a little more horsepower, but you know, that's, that's not saying much because the Beetle was never known for that.

Yeah, it would actually cough sometimes.

Right.

Yeah.

Uh, he gave it hydraulic brakes, which is pretty good, and shock absorbers, but again, none of that stuff was like, it was always a car that felt a little janky to drive.

I remember you talking about yours, and the heater was redirected waste heat from the engine onto your ankles.

Is that correct?

Yeah, they just had these little vents down on the floorboards, and we call them ankle burners because it would just pump heat directly from the engine right out to your feet.

And it would ultimately heat the car, but it would scorch the ankles.

Was it bad enough that you could smell the hair on your legs burning?

I didn't have hair on my legs then.

Okay.

So, but it didn't have AC at all, did it?

No, I know that the some of the Super Beetles did later, and I don't think my Super Beetle did, though.

But my 68 definitely did not.

It was 260 air, which is you drive 60 miles an hour and roll down two windows.

Not a dad joke.

That was a joke I heard back then.

Okay.

From a dad?

Probably.

So Heinz Nordoff, he comes in, he takes over, and he's like, look, there's a lot of stuff we can do.

Like you said, we can update the car.

The problem is we can sell a million of these in Germany, but German marks are so devalued right now because of the fallout of World War II that we need to get some dollars in here.

And the way that you get dollars is start selling them in America.

So he tried that, and it did not go very well at first, in large part because America was like, that's a Nazi car, and you're probably a Nazi trying to sell us a Nazi car.

And by the way, your stupid Nazi car is ugly as sin.

Get out of here, Nazi.

Yeah.

And Heinz Nordoff was like, well, let's try this again in a year.

Yeah, and that's all it took.

I think the first Beetle, and it was just a single one that came to America was in 1949.

It was a Dutch car dealer named Ben Pond.

And

he had to sell that thing for like whatever he could get just so he could go back home, like, you know, transatlantic sale back home.

That he's like, all right, I did, I barely sold the one car, so it's probably not a good idea to buy a bunch of these.

But like you said, just one year later in 1950, there was a dealer named Max Hoffman, a foreign car dealer, that ended up selling 330 Volkswagens to dealerships that were selling Porsches and Jags, other foreign cars, so it fit in just a little better and doesn't look that much different.

You know,

those old bathtub Porsches, you know, the design isn't that different than the BW Beetle.

They're very round and sort of buggy looking.

That's true, for sure.

So I think in 1950 they sold 330 of them.

Yeah.

In 1955, they sold 32,662 of them.

And one of the reasons for the huge leap forward, especially considering when the year before they sold 9,000, was that Volkswagen of America was formed.

So essentially an extension, the American version of Volkswagen was formed.

And that really kind of helped streamline importing,

setting up dealerships, moving cars to those dealerships, getting car salesmen to step away from their chicken fingers in the break room and actually go out and sell the cars for once in their life.

That's really all those factors put together are what helped them start selling Beatles like crazy in the mid-50s.

Should we take a break?

Sure.

All right, good.

Because I got a cliffhanger.

A very key thing happened in the mid-50s to really ramp up sales of these.

We'll talk about that right after this.

Stuff you should know.

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So, Chuck, you left everybody hanging.

You said that

you had a cliffhanger about something that happened in the 50s that really kind of revved the Beetle up into hyperdrive,

which I think is a thing.

Yeah, and I said mid-50s.

It was really 1959, and anyone that has been around the advertising industry or even knows a little bit about it or watched Mad Men knows that there was a series of brilliant, brilliant ads brought forth by the DDB and almost said insurance agency, ad agency

that

I hate to say this, but they leaned into

what people didn't like about the Volkswagen and tried to make that a selling point.

And they did so to tremendous success.

Yeah, it was a real game changer.

Yeah, so this, I mean, like, everybody in advertising knows about this, and a lot of people outside of advertising know about it because it's just talked about so much.

And the reason why, it was a great ad campaign.

Just visually speaking, they used all sorts of different techniques that were very much different than

what you would normally find to sell American cars, which were huge land yachts at the time.

This is the, I think, the first compact car that America ever encountered.

But, like you said, they, they, um, they really kind of took some of the criticisms of the Beatle and turned them into selling points.

One of the first things they said was that it's ugly, but it gets you there.

So, this, this was just one example of what came to be called an anti-ad campaign.

It was like the

what was that Paul Riser movie from the 80s where he like just turns the ad world on its on its head by just speaking the truth about the products he's selling?

You know, the one

no

yeah what it was like uh an ad for volva was they're they're boxy but they're good i don't remember that movie at all i can't remember what it was called it doesn't matter but it was basically a movie based on this even though it they would it was never meant to be like a fictionalized version of it they just i think it gave the screenwriter an idea is what i'm saying okay i get you um one of the ads became uh and i guess it was the most famous one it's not the one i think of first but it was named Ad of the Century by Ad Age.

It was it just said think small.

And the one I remember most specifically was,

and not by seeing it, you know, live, obviously, because this was before my time, but I just remember seeing, I guess, reading about it or something, but it was just a picture of the VW Beetle, and it said lemon underneath it.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, which lemon is, you know, a car that's kind of sucks.

Right.

So I'm not sure what they were going for with that.

Can you explain well i don't know i mean the same as the other ones that say ugly is only skin deep uh you know they were just sort of playing upon people saying it was ugly or saying it was you know uh i don't know if people were saying it wasn't a quality car because

lemon definitely indicates like it doesn't run well so that was a real um

sort of

extra brave i think even compared to the rest I mean, even I don't get that one at all.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

I'll have to go look further into it.

What's your search norm?

Can someone explain to me why they?

Yeah, I'll write it out exactly like that.

Well, I mean, I don't think it's that much different than saying it's ugly.

No, it is, because ugly, it's like, that's all just a point of view.

It's, it's subjective.

And really, ultimately, if the car runs well, a lot of people don't care what it looks like.

A lineman, everyone cares that the car is not going to run well.

It does not, it makes no sense to me whatsoever, but I'll figure it out and I'll report back.

How about that?

Yeah, well, maybe that's why I remembered it because it didn't make any sense, right?

But, but it, yeah, and I guess you ended up buying one, so there you go.

Uh, well, my favorite one was live below your means.

That's pretty fun, but who wants to do that?

Well, I'll tell you who wants to do that.

People who essentially were the basis of the counterculture, the people who were the who were the beats a few years earlier, started to grow up, started to go to college, were very highly educated, but still did not want to follow in the exact steps of their parents.

And the Beetle kind of gave them a, well, a vehicle out of their parents' shadow to kind of forge their own path.

It was basically a finger to the crew cut buying a Beetle was in the early 60s.

Yeah, and it's very weird that my parents bought one brand new in 68 because they were not that at all.

My dad was the crew cut, like literally.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

They weren't counterculture.

Like, I have no idea.

Maybe, I mean, maybe my mom thought it was cute.

Maybe my dad did.

I have no idea.

I'm going to have to ask my mom about that.

But cost-wise,

it's probably because of the cost because they didn't have a lot of money.

And in 1964, you could get a Beetle for $1,565

compared to about $2,400 for a Ford Mustang at the time or close to $7,000 for a convertible Lincoln Continental.

So it was definitely affordable.

And I'm sure that's probably why they got it.

Yeah.

And so they started selling a ton of these things.

In 1968, they sold 420,000 just in America.

And by this time, by this year, around the world, it was the best-selling car in the world.

This was 20 years after Heinz Nordoff took over.

So we went from essentially this Nazi car to the best-selling car in the world in two decades, which is

quite a feat.

Yeah, for sure.

Just a year after that, it got a big bump when Disney came out with the Love Bug movies.

The initial one was just the Love Bug, and Herbie, of course, was the name of that 63 Beetle.

That if you haven't seen those movies, they're like those 60s, early 70s Disney movies.

They're kind of fun, but they're not great.

But Herbie was definitely a lovable car, and you can still see Herbie versions driving around with the two off-center stripes.

Yeah.

And whatever the number in the circle was.

I can't remember what its racing number was.

6'3 or 53?

I don't know.

Well, it was probably 63 because it was a 63 Beetle.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I'm more of a Snowball Express man myself.

Have you ever seen that one?

No.

It's a good one.

Okay.

Okay.

Just check that one out and thank me later.

I bet this stuff is all on the

Disney app.

Don't they have all their classics on there?

Snowball Express, for sure.

Watch that one and then watch the North Avenue Irregulars.

Those are pretty cool.

I do remember that one.

I love that movie.

Okay, so if you love North Avenue Irregulars, there's a good chance you're going to like Snowball Express.

I guarantee it.

One thing about the movie, though, was it was a

radio-controlled car.

Like it's driving around by itself.

That's the whole concept that there's a car that's kind of alive.

And you might think, oh, cool, they figured out how to remote control this car.

It was actually a whole movie-making trick where they have somebody down out of view of the windows, kind of in the back seat, like a stunt driver driving that thing.

Yeah.

And we say that because there's a bunch of people on the internet saying this is what's the world's first self-driving car, and they're just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wow, I didn't know that people claim that.

Yeah, wrongly what about um what about Mexico Chuck because it turns out that Mexico and the Beetle go hand in hand I didn't know that though oh you didn't know that no I mean I

no I didn't I'm not going to even try to BS my way out of it I did not know that I am surprised that you've been to Mexico City and that you did not notice the inordinate amount of VW Beetles driving around

I just saw a forest yeah

that's what I was kind of one of the things I was looking forward to when I went to Mexico City for the first time because I heard there were just like VW Beetles everywhere.

And there are because they were made there until 2003, which is remarkable.

Like you can buy a 2003, you know, final year edition Mexican Volkswagen Beetle.

I went online immediately and like, you can buy one for like 15 grand that I saw that was looked to be in pretty good shape.

And that's kind of all I want now.

Okay.

Good to know.

Somebody's got a birthday coming up in March.

Yeah, they actually, the factory in Pueblo, Mexico, which was the first plant outside of Germany, or the largest plant outside of Germany,

it outlasted the one in Wolfsburg.

I think the one in Wolfsburg shut down, or the one, sorry, yeah, the one, it was in Stuttgart, the Wolfsburg plant in Stuttgart.

It shut down in 1974.

And like you said, the Mexican plant kept going going until 2003.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

And again, they stopped selling new Beetles in the States in 1979.

But Latin America is like, we still love them.

So keep them coming, Mexico.

And Mexico said right on.

Yeah, for sure.

I know I mentioned earlier sort of the Dune Buggy conversion that some people have done.

The initial guy, I guess, or I don't know if he was the first one, but the guy that really got famous for it was a California kind of car guy and racer named Bruce Myers.

And he was a Dunebuggy guy.

He built a kit car using a Beetle chassis and kind of reconfigured the shell.

If you've ever seen like

Wonderbug, the Sid Martycroft show from the 1970s, it's that kind of Dune buggy.

But it was called the Myers-Manx.

Very, very popular, especially in California after he won the Baja 1000 in one of those in 1967.

And you can, I went to the Myers-Manx website.

They are building a new one, the first one in decades.

It's called the Manx 2.0 EV.

And it is, did you see this thing?

Yeah, I did.

They're amazing.

Oh, man.

I immediately was like, should I put a deposit down on this thing?

It's like 500 bucks to put down a deposit.

Right.

$74,000 starting price.

So I immediately was like, oh, I don't think so.

I'll just admire them.

Right.

Yeah, they had another one.

I can't remember what it was called, but it was like $125,000 starting or something.

These are like doom buggies, electric doom buggies, essentially.

And I'm not sure that they go off-road.

I didn't have that impression.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to, if it's a Manx, it'll, it'll do all you want.

Okay.

Well, it's good.

It's got a pretty, it's because it's so small, it's going to have a limited range, like 125 miles.

But if you're a listener out there and you end up getting one of these, I will meet you wherever you are in the United States to ride around in it with you.

Oh, cool.

There you go.

Putting out that offer right now.

I think we should talk about

a few stats, a few few records that VW

put out.

Sure.

Well, one thing was that they kept kind of upgrading or updating or tweaking the bug in all sorts of ways.

But if you really look at the first bug that came out in the 40s and you look at the bugs that were produced until 2003, they don't look very different.

It's essentially the same car, which is why it's considered the longest-selling car of all time.

It's the greatest selling of all time.

I think they sold 21 million plus Beatles

over the production run.

But

it was essentially the same car.

And so they would tweak it and release these limited editions once in a while.

One was the Sports Bug, one was a Bicentennial Bug, and then there was one that came out in 1977 called the Champagne Edition.

And I looked into these and it seemed like maybe that had a different exclusive paint color or there was a slight tweak to the trim package or something.

The Champagne Edition came with a Coke mirror and a vacuum vacuum-shaped metal straw.

But other than that, they seem like just regular Beatles.

Yeah, I mean, it was convertible, but there were other convertibles.

I always wanted a convertible too, because, you know, back in those days with the Beatles, it was just like a couple of twists of a knobs, and then you manually just sort of threw it back over your head.

Never was able to get a convertible.

You're right about the body style never changed.

The taillights would change shape a little bit here and there, and that's kind of one of the ways you could tell what year it was.

But other than some sort of headlight, taillight stuff, it was basically the same shape.

Even through the Super Beetle, they might have been a slightly different shape.

They were a little bit bigger, I think.

Yeah.

But not much, because I had a Super Beetle in it.

It's not like it was roomy, you know.

Yeah, and you had to be paying attention to probably spot the difference between a beetle and a super beetle unless they were parked next to each other, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

But VW Beetle owners were and are still very much known for being very into them and sort of knowing that kind of stuff.

It's sort of like

it wasn't just a car usually.

It was like something that you adored and were into and you could get parts cheap and, you know, generally work on it yourself because when you looked at that engine, it looked like it had like nine or ten parts total.

Yeah.

And apparently VW dealerships kept all parts in stock from all years, essentially.

They had huge, huge stockpiles of parts.

So you could always be like, well, I can at least go get this thing fixed pretty cheaply.

Yeah, for sure.

And we should probably close with a car that you owned, or at least Yumi bought that thing, right?

Yeah, that was Yumi's car, the new Beetle.

Yeah.

It was cute.

It didn't surprise me.

It was super cute, and it just fit Yumi to a T, I think.

Yeah, she would do doughnuts in that thing all day long.

It had the best turn radius.

Oh, really?

Not really.

I mean, yeah, it would turn fine, but she didn't actually do doughnuts as far as I ever knew.

No, no, no.

I knew that part was true, but I thought it had like a noted turn radius or something.

No.

Okay.

You just got me on that.

I did.

But one thing it did have, Chuck, was a little vase, a little flower vase next to the steering wheel.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, it's very cute.

And I think they look pretty cool.

I wish they would have made it a little more traditionally looking like a bug.

Like the couple of things that bothered me,

and this is nitpicky as a Beetle guy, was

the flush headlights and the flush taillights.

I always loved that they stuck out before.

But aside from that, I think they honored it quite well.

Yeah.

They did an update in 2011 that I thought was pretty cool, too.

I don't know if I saw that one.

I'll have to look that one up.

Okay.

So you look that up.

I'm going to look at the text of your square back

Beetle station wagon.

Yeah.

I'm going to look up that lemon, that confusing lemon ad.

Okay.

And there might have been something else, so I'll have to go back and re-listen to this.

Well, I got one more quick little thing because if you have ever been in a Beetle or owned one, and this is something I didn't know until Dave pointed this out, there's a very particular smell that when I stick my head in a Beetle, it's just like it zaps me back.

It smelled like no other car made on the interior.

And apparently that came from the cushioning of the seats.

It was made out of coconut hair.

And I remember seeing that coconut hair like falling out from under my seats and stuff, but I never knew that was what the smell was due to.

Did it smell like coconuts or it just had this distinct smell?

Just a distinct smell.

I think it was the vinyl combined with that coconut hair.

It was just super, super distinct.

Very nice.

Well, I guess, well, Chuck's, do you have anything else?

No, that's it.

Well, since Chuck started nostalgizing, then he just accidentally triggered listener mail.

That's right.

I'm going to call this,

I guess, a follow-up on Madman Mutt.

Mm-hmm.

Because this is a pretty fun email.

Hey, guys, a big fan of the show.

I was very excited listening to the topic on 8-Tracks and was thinking silently, they better mention Muntz.

They better mention Muntz.

Because Earl Madman Muntz was born here in Elgin, Illinois.

He led a very colorful life, and his part of the 8-Track story is only a small portion of that wildlife.

He was an innovator in giant screen televisions, cellular telephones for cars, and satellite receivers.

He started as a car salesman, and this is the basis of the typical crazy use car salesman thing.

And one of his slogans was i buy them high and sell them low it's more fun that way don't tell mrs muntz

uh

and she pointed out he he failed to mention uh what uh mrs muntz he was talking about because i think he had seven wives

i think i saw that when we were doing the eight track research what that that ad No, that he had

like seven, seven marriages, I think.

Yeah, you know, I'm not one to blame a divorce on a person, but if you've been married seven times, you may be the problem.

You know?

Sure.

He would smash cars with sledgehammers, wear a tricorn hat with red longjohns.

So he was, you know, he was supposedly invented the wacky car salesman guy routine.

That's pretty cool.

So Madman Months will be the subject of the Elgin History Museum's podcast,

Echoes of Elgin, on August 1st of this year, if you want to learn a little bit more.

And this is coming from Rebecca Miller, who is the museum educator at the Elgin History Museum.

Very neat.

Thanks a lot, Rebecca.

Chuck, I have to say, I have a terrible feeling that we're going to get a lot of follow-up emails saying it's pronounced Elgin.

Oh, is it Elgin?

I don't know, but I could just totally see it.

All right, well, just pretend I said Elgin, if that's the case.

We'll have Jerry go edit hard G's until all the time she said Elgin.

Yeah, instead of giving her a full read, I'll just go, gh.

Yeah.

Lace that, Jerry.

Yeah, just lace that in.

If you want to be like Rebecca and bring us up to speed on somebody we just kind of mentioned but really walked past, we love that kind of thing.

You can do what Rebecca did and send us an email.

Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

iHeart presents the Big Three Playoffs.

This Sunday, the remaining four teams battle to make their championship in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game.

Then Dwight Howard and his Ellie Riot take on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J Chicago Triplets.

The finale will see popular Miami 305, with stars MVP Michael Beasley and Lance Stevenson take on Nancy Lieberman's Dallas Power, who will make it to the Big Three championship?

The no-holds ball action starts Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, 12 Pacific, only on CBS.

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