BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR
The VW defined the flower power generation back then and now the New Beetle redefines our generation.
By Jeff Rundles
When I was a very young kid, back in the 1950s, my mother’s younger brother pulled into our driveway one day for a visit in the strangest car I ever saw: a Volkswagen. Mind you, this was in Flint, Michigan and the standard for cars there, and everywhere in America in those days, were huge, chrome-laden hunks of steel called Chevrolet and Buick. The tiny little Volkswagen was so odd as to elicit laughs and finger pointing, all of it intentionally derisive. No one would ever really aspire to such an odd, foreign car; it was simply a college boy’s cheap stunt, and soon he’d grow into a proper car.
Back in those days my uncle’s car was just a Volkswagen. No one had yet given it the “Beetle” or “Bug” moniker that would come to define it, because then it was the only Volkswagen model in America and there weren’t many of them around.
But it wouldn’t be long. By the mid- to late 1960s, the VW Beetle became the unofficial symbol of college kids everywhere, first as cheap transportation and then as the vehicle of choice for the then-ubiquitous “how-many-college-kids-can-fit-into-a…” stunt. As such, the Bug became synonymous with freedom and possibilities and youthful exuberance. Not long after, say 1966-67 when someone in California painted big daisies on a VW Bug, the car added more symbolism to its resume, all at once taking on iconic status as the manifestation of Flower Power for hippies and as the moving background for the burgeoning anti-war, anti-establishment counter-culture.
At about this same time, the Bug was joined in this symbolism by the VW Microbus, the Hippie Van as those over 30 would call it, and the iconic stature of VW became more than a fad; it became permanently sewn into the fabric of an entire generation.
This was helped in large part by a now famous advertising campaign created by the New York agency Doyle, Dane Bernbach, a creative effort that appealed to the young and boosted VW sales to such high levels that the campaign itself became as famous as the car. Interestingly, back in the hey-day 1960s VW never officially used the word “Beetle” in the car’s name or badge, and the word didn’t appear in its advertising until 1968.
Just like the “movement,” as it were, the fervor for the VW Bug and Microbus gave way to the 1970s, but VW had firmly established itself in the American automobile market. Indeed, it was the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which drastically raised gasoline prices for the first time, that gave VW and all of the new foreign auto competitors something of an edge as these non-American cars were, by and large, much more fuel efficient than the average offering from the Big Three.
VW, which had also introduced the Fastback, Notchback and Squareback models based on the Beetle platform to limited success in the 1960s, responded in the mid-1970s with new models. The most successful was the hatchback Rabbit, known as the Golf overseas and in the US later, which is still in the lineup today. One of the least successful was the oddity called Thing, which had the vague look of a WWII military vehicle, and which lasted only two years in US sales (mostly due to Ralph Nader-led safety concerns, it was quickly withdrawn). And of course, there was the highly stylized Karmann Ghia sports car which found some adherents.
But the models that really made VW’s bones in the late 1970s and then into the future were the Jetta and the Passat. Both are still marketed today, which gives you some idea of their venerability.
The line, however, got stale and outdated in the 1980s, especially as it related to its chief competitors, the Japanese led by Toyota, Honda and Nissan. By the early 1990s sales of all VWs in the US were so low that there were repeated prognostications that the German automaker would simply exit the American market.
One of the biggest casualties in the VW lineup had been the Beetle itself. The company had de-emphasized its original model, and quit selling them altogether in the US market in 1991. It then dawned on someone smart that it was the Beetle itself that had defined the company, and they went back to the drawing board and came up with the design of the New Beetle, launched with much fanfare in the US in 1996.
The popularity was immediate, and unlike any other car launched in this period by either American or foreign car makers, the appeal of the New Beetle was clearly one based on its nostalgic factor. The Baby Boom Generation, which had embraced the Bug with unusual fervor in the 1960s, re-embraced the New Beetle in the late 1990s with enough retro-enthusiasm that it essentially save VW in America.
It may be the only case in history where nostalgia saved a company. Volkswagen, which set the advertising world on its ear in the 1960s, gave retro a new definition in the 1990s with the New Beetle. Some would successfully emulate – think BMW with the reintroduction of the Mini Cooper – while others have screwed it up. I mean, c’mon; Chevrolet reintroduced the Malibu name a couple of years ago, but it was hardly anything that harkened back to the Beach Boys in 1964. Perhaps if they had done it right – done it like VW – the American automotive news would be different now.
In any case, VW marches on. There have been some setbacks – the $80,000 Pheaton comes to mind – but for the most part VW continues to be a relatively healthy brand in the US market, helped in large measure by the Baby Boomers who came of age with the Beetle.
For my own part, I – a Baby Boomer through and through – have had a long an enduring relationship with VW. In college in the very early 1970s back in Ann Arbor, I owned a thread-bare 1966 Microbus that took me to many a concert at Cobo Hall in Detroit. In the late 1970s, I had a 1972 Super Beetle that constantly smelled like gasoline and was horrible in the snow. In the mid-1980s my wife had a very nice 1984 Jetta, which had its radio stolen so many times that I put a sign in the window telling any thieves I would buy them a radio if they just wouldn’t break any glass. And today, my own-college-aged daughter makes her way back and forth between Denver and Boulder in a 2007 Jetta.
I really would like a New Beetle, though. Or even an old one. The truth is, at my age the most powerful thing I possess is my memories.
