Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: How many cars did Volkswagen sell in the U.S. in 1949, its first year in the market?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you’re right!
Volkswagen sold 366,970 vehicles in the U.S. last year. The Chattanooga Tennessee-built Passat accounting for 96,649 of those sales, while the rest arrived via ship from Europe, or across the southern border from the Puebla Mexico plant, the company’s largest outside of Germany.
It wasn’t always like that. Volkswagen was one of the first major foreign auto makers to attempt to crack the mainstream U.S. market, but initially they weren’t alone. The company was part of a vanguard of imports that proved that American car buyers were willing to overlook wartime animosity in their search for something different and perhaps more efficient than the hulking offerings from Detroit.
Imports took up an insubstantial 2% of the U.S. auto market in 1948 – the year before Volkswagen’s entrance – but in just ten years buyers of imports accounted for more than 11%, or about equal to Chrysler’s sales at the time. Of course that rapid growth had to start somewhere, and for Volkswagen that first year proved to be a challenge.
From VW.com:

 (January 30, 2014) This month, the Volkswagen Beetle celebrates 65 years since it first arrived in the United States. In January of 1949, a Volkswagen “Type 1,” or Beetle, was shipped to New York City by Ben Pon, Sr., a Dutch businessman and the world’s first official Volkswagen importer. That car—and another, subsequent Beetle— found buyers the same year, marking the first time that Volkswagen vehicles were sold in the United States.

Two cars. An inauspicious beginning to say the least, but better than actually shipping unsold cars back to Germany as the company was later forced to do with the unloved Corrado. A little more than a decade later the number of Type 1s sold in the U.S. had grown to more than 300,000, and by the late sixties the company was selling over 400,000 of the iconic cars to U.S. buyers every year. Today it takes a far broader product line for the company to reach that number, but amazingly to start, it only took two.
Source: JoeSherlock
Image: OldCarandTruckPictures