Welcome to Throwback Monday where we take a look at how things once were, or at least how certain famous cars were once built. This week we’re looking at how the Volkswagen Beetle was put together over the course of its life.
With more than 21-million built over the course of its 58-year production run, the Volkswagen Type One—affectionately known as the Beetle—is one of the world’s great success stories. One of the most amazing facts about the car is that it barely changed over all those years, nor did the way it was produced.
The Beetle is one of the world’s most famous—and most infamous—cars. Its origins stem from Nazi Germany’s desire in the 1930s to create a ‘People’s Car’ that would take advantage of the new highways system first envisioned during the Weimar Republic in the ’20s. Hitler supported the creation of a road network as a symbol of national pride but also as a mechanism for moving troops and armament rapidly across the country. The HaFraBa or “car only road” effort began as a make-work program under the Nazi regime in the early ’30s.
With the new roads under construction, Hitler’s next vision was a car to ply them. The Nazi leader tapped Ferdinand Porsche to design just such a ‘People’s Car’ in 1934. The car Porsche came up with was strikingly similar to a prototype small car that had been developed and then abandoned by the Moravian car maker, Tatra. This later led to Tatra accusing Porsche and Hitler of intellectual property theft and lingering bad feelings between them and Volkswagen. Porsche once admitted in reference to Hans Ledwinka, the Tatra designer, “Well, sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine.”  In 1965 Volkswagen paid Tatra-Ringhoffer one-million Marks to settle the dispute.
By that time the Type 1 had been in series production for more than 20 years, and would continue for more than 30 more. Initial production took place at VW’s Wolfburg plant, but it eventually expanded to almost every corner of the globe. The locations may have been different, but the production techniques never changed all that much. Here we have two films showing Beetle production, one from Australia in the 1960s, and another from Germany about a decade later.
Now, 10-years is a long time in the automotive world, but not when your name is Beetle. Look at how similar the production techniques are between the decades, and how much hand (and hammer) construction went into each car. I especially like the draw-string technique for installing the window glass. It’s an urban legend that Beetles were so tight they would float and on hot days the expanding air pressure inside a buttoned up one might pop one of the windows out, here you can see why that might have been the case.
Let’s turn back the clock, and then turn it back some more, and see how the Beetle became a car.
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Image: The Globe and Mail