Das Letzt Bug

The Volkswagen Beetle started out as the car that nobody wanted to build. Ferdinand Porsche, who designed it, dreamed from the early 1920s of a "people's car" that would provide the kind of cheap transportation that Henry Ford's flivvers gave the U.S. Even after Adolf Hitler came to power and ordered automakers to produce a small car, Porsche's plans for his slope-nosed oddity got nowhere. Not until 1938, when Hitler made tt a state project did the Volkswagen become a reality--just in time to be modified into a Jeep-like military vehicle. At a meeting in Cologne in 1948, the VW plant, which had begun postwar production the year before, was offered gratis to Henry Ford II. He turned it down.

Last week, more than 19 million Beetles later, workers at the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg were busy enshrining the last Bug to be produced in West Germany. Some 300,000 Beetles a year will still be made in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, mostly for local use. And the familiar shape will not fade very soon elsewhere. The company claims that well over half of the Beetles built are still on the roads around the world, including nearly 4 million in the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.