An interesting article about the beloved Beetle.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130830-the-nazi-car-we-came-to-love 

Hi Norm, looks like no one can do a Beetle history without highlighting Hitler. Getting very tired.

Porsche had the 'people's car' idea long before Hitler came along. He designed small affordable cars for Zundapp, and NSU, in the late '20s and early '30s. Porsche never even met Hitler until 1933.

Hitler's favourite make of car was Mercedes, but no one ever seems to mention that nowadays. It's always VW = Hitler, which I am thoroughly sick of hearing.

And why doesn't anyone mention that Japanese Zero fighter planes were built by Mitsubishi ?

Hi Phil
Yes, it was Porsche's idea and He was designing cars all His adult life

If not for those few pics of Hitler sitting in prototype beetles when they were laying the foundation stones for the new factory, no one would have noticed.. lol ..
Hitler just wanted a very cheap car...
Hitler didn't even drive a car.. lol

You need to visit the Darwin war memorial...
Every photo of a ZERO or even mention of a Zero and it is written as MITSUBISHI ZERO ... and there are many pics etc..

Maybe other people don't notice.. lol.. ?
but as a Mitsubishi owner for many years, I did.. lol

cheers

LEE

Hi Lee,

Mitsubishi was also a shipbuilder, and contributed to many of the warships the Imperial Japanese navy. Thank goodness the US navy sent them all to the bottom. Mitsubishi used slave labour during the war, and was involved in the opium trade in China. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was based in Nagasaki, the main reason the US dropped the fat man plutonium atomic bomb there in August 1945. Yet no motoring journalist ever mentions the war when writing about Mitsubishi. Kawasaki also made numerous Japanese war planes, such as the Ki-61 Tony and Ki-48 bomber. Toyo Kogyo. the parent company of today's Mazda, was based in Hiroshima (Mazda is still there today).

The Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter plane, the famous rival of the Spitfire, always used a Daimler-Benz engine. The much feared Focke-Wulf Fw-190 used a BMW radial engine - in fact to this day the BMW logo is a stylized spinning aeroplane propeller. Yet road tests and history articles always gloss over their war involvement, if mentioned at all.

But with the Beetle it's always Hitler Hitler Hitler. I'm sick of it.

Hey before you go patting Ferdinand for a great job remember he was part of a group of people who designed the car, some of the other people were jewish and when the nazis took over were removed from vw documentation. All Hitler/nazis did was bankroll the car.

You are right; Franz Reimspeiss designed the flat four motor, Erwin Komenda did the styling and Josef Kales did the suspension design. Porsche oversaw the project, set the guidelines and had the final say on techical decisions. Reimspiess also designed the famous VW symbol.

But the Nazis also started and bankrolled other instututions, such as the autobahn system, the German railways and Lufthansa. The point I was making is - How come they don't have the lazy journaist Hitler-Nazi, always mentioning the war thing, that every dumb Beetle news story does nowadays?

But onto the BBC report that Norm has flagged - it is full of errors.

* The caption at the top says "The VW Beetle became the most-produced car in automotive history, with 40 million rolling off production lines between 1945 and 2003. (Getty Images)". Wrong. 21.52 million.

* The Beetle is not the "best selling car of all time." It has long been passed by the Toyota Corolla, Ford F-series truck and the VW Golf. The Golf passed 30 million earlier this year. You could say the Beetle is the biggest selling 'single design', although even that is debatable. Superbugs were a different VW model type from torsion bar Beetles.

* The idea was not Adolf Hitler's, as already mentioned.

* There have only been 5 Herbie movies, not 6. The 1997 TV special does not count as it was not a cinema release.

* Campervans were NOT based on Beetles! Dear oh dear. They were based on the Type 2, a complely different vehicle.

* Porsche was born in Maffersdorf, in what is today the Czech republic, but moved to Vienna when he was 18. He was Austrian all his life, so calling him 'Bohemian' is a stretch - more poetry than reality.