Surely Herbie gave a boost to the Beetle’s popularity?
Have had a number of VS over the past 15 years. I still have a squareback I am looking for a home for … I want to give it to someone who will actually RESTORE it instead of someone who will thrash it out by [sorry to offend, but the old term sums up how obscene I find the process] niggerize it by adding body parts that are not patterned off the original, putting in the obscenely huge and stupid boomboom sound systems - basically any 'pimp my ride shit. When you get a classic car, it deserves to be restored, not niggerized.
The draw of a VW is exactly what people have said, it was a small, inexpensive car that could be easily repaired by ones self, got great mileage, was easy to park, and was counterculture.
Plus which, you remove the rear seat and get a cable spool from . . . wherever you get cable spools . . . and voila! you have a late '60s living room suite.
Youtube doesn’t seem to have the clip from “Sleeper” where Woody finds one, covered in dirt, presumably having sat there for decades. He jumps in, and the dub starts first time.
The Beetle is also one of the only cars to have it’s own travel game. I just taught someone how to play Slug Bug yesterday. Her left shoulder is probably a bit sore today.
Here in New York it’s called " PunchBuggy". Brutal.
I grew up in Beetles. Daddy had a 1958 Beetle. By the time I was around ( born in '62 ) and aware, the entire overcoat was worn off and I could rub my finger down the wheel well and come up with powder blue paint. It eventually just wore away. The floorboards were plywood for most of my childhood with carpeting glued to them.
Mom got her first car. A 1968 SuperBeetle. ( First year for them ? ) Looked big next to Dad’s and I know they were bigger but please. A smidgen at best.
My brother and I used to fight over who got to ride in the well. Them’s were the days… the new Beetle is, how does one say in mixed company?.. an abomination? Yes.
Cartooniverse
The neighbor who lived behind our house was a beetle owner. Once thier family went camping with ours. Thier entire family, two teenaged girls, one girl a year older than me (about 5 at the time)one teenaged boy, Mr. C, All 250 lbs. of Mrs. C AND all the camping gear and food for a weekend went from Denver to a lake in the mountains in ONE Beetle. The rear seat was removed, and they sat on tent, sleeping bags, ice chest, etc.
I don’t think they were larger. They had curved, tempered glass windshields instead of the flat wind pane, and I think that’s maybe when the tail lights and front marker lights changed.
The AMC Gremlin, pretender to the throne.
See p.2 for the “Rambulance.”
There was also the infamous “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, He’d be President today” ad that appeared in National Lampoon. VW was not amused.
Those things had a flat underside; like a plate, right? I came down and around a famous steep hill back home in mine one day. Turned so hard and fast that I peeled the driver’s side front tire off the rim, simulating a blowout. The Beetle then skittered on the cusp between the pavement and the paved ditch for a couple hundred feet - skip, skip, skip - just like skipping a stone. Popped back on the road way right before coming to a culvert. Man, I was pulling like all get-out on the wheel.
The book, How to keep Your Volkswagen Alive may have contributed to the popularity.
I drove one because it was inexpensive, got good mileage AND VW didn’t change the parts each year, so I could go to a junk yard and get replacement parts. All of those things are important when you are poor.
The Beetle was not really small. Yes, small in respect to the aircraft carriers that Detroit was building, but not really small. They looked small but the only thing they were small on was creature comforts. The passenger space was very cramped. (I think “comfy” is a totally inaccurate term.) There was very little trunk space. The heaters were about worthless. The windshield wiper were a joke. They are noisy because of the timing chain (instead of a timing belt).
For the size of the car, the space was used very inefficiently which made it seem small. As an example, the van used the same chassis but used space more efficiently. The van didn’t look small but the bug did.
The VW would run forever but it would never run right. It was a design that quickly became obsolete but it hung on because there was no viable competition for a cheap, fuel efficient car with readily available replacement parts.
Not on any that I saw. The crankshaft and camshaft were geared together. The characteristic noise came mainly from the pushrod-rocker arrangement to drive the valves.
A brand-new, red, 1965 beetle with sunroof and AM/FM radio cost me, bottom line, including tax & delivery, US$2060. It was fun and cheap to drive (30MPG), made it across country several times before blowing up at 60,000 miles. I wish I had it today.
$2,060 in 1965 = $13,600 in 2007.
Source of figures?
As Matt mentioned, the VW flat 4 used timing gears, not a chain. The distinctive sound of an air cooled VW was a combo of the fan, the strange layout of the engine, the factory muffler and exhaust leaks. Don’t forget to add the burnt exhaust valves. Also the engine was not an even fire engine. Cylinder #3 fired retarded compared to the other three to try and keep that cylinder cool. It seems that the Germans mounted the oil cooler right over cylinder #3 and therefore it ran hotter than all the others. By retarding the timing on just that cylinder, it had a change of living a bit longer. But it was almost always #3 exhaust valve that burnt first.
When I worked in an independent shop back in the early 1970s, I saw some spectacular engine failures on VWs. Valves buried in heads or pistons. Con rods hanging in mid air because the piston and barrel were both just gone.
It was in many ways a craptacular design engine wise. “I’ve got it Hans, ve will put the carburetor right above the high voltage distributor so that if any gas leaks, the car burns to the ground, and ve get to sell another one!” (yes they did, and yes they did)
Balthisar IIRC the super beetle was a bit wider to accommodate the McPherson strut front suspension. Not much, but a bit.
Because of the simple, robust (if quirky and occasionally flawed) design and parts commonality they were easy and relatively inexpensive to maintain, especially in the era when Detriot was assuming (and doing their best to assure) that everbody bought a new car every two or three years. The Falcon, intended to be Ford’s entry into the compact car market, also sold remarkably well in the era of enormous land yachts with big tail fins because of many of the elements it shared with the Volkswagon; large production volume for parts availability, relative simplicity of both powertrain and body design, compact (for its day) size for urban commuters, good gas mileage, and a wide network of support. Of course, Ford made the two-pronged mistake of both growing the Falcon in size and price, and competing against it with other high end models including the Falcon-derived Mustang. Volkswagon, on the other hand, made what was essentially the same vehicle with evolutionary upgrades, and it probably would have kept selling indefinitely if not for rising emissions and safety standards. Its evolutionary successors are the Rabbit, the Japanese subcompacts of the 'Seventies and 'Eighties like the CCVC/Civic, and the modern Toyota Scion line.
An interesting case study is to look at parallels in the Japanese automotive industry, which started from a base of British designs (many of the initial post-WWII offerings were virtual clones of British cars), but migrated to German design practices and production models. The Nissan L engines and the Subaru EA engines, among others, were strongly based upon German engine design principles and became widely used in the product lines of their respective companies, and are still the basis for currently produced engine designs. Eschewing the Lucas, Prince of Darkness philosophy (“Gentlemen do not motor after dark,”) led from the cheap, failure-prone designs of the 'Fifties to the robust, fuel efficient, easily maintained vehicles of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies which came into favor when fuel prices skyrockted.
The New Beetle is an abomination that ignores virtually everything that was good about the original Type 1 and replaces it with an overly-heavy, overly-complex, overpriced not-terribly-compact car with mediocre gas mileage and reliability, relying almost entirely on nostalgia and/or kitsch appeal to distingish it from any of the functionally superior cars in the same class. It is really no comparison to the original Type 1 ‘Beetle’.
Stranger