End of the new edition
FrankfurtAbschied of an icon – the Volkswagen Group is the construction of his legendary beetle finally. This Wednesday, celebrations take place in Puebla, Mexico for the production of the final vehicle of a 5961-car special edition New Beetle. It will then find space in the museum.
This marks the end of a more than 80-year chapter in automotive engineering. The first beetle design goes to the Austrian Ferdinand Porsche and similarities with the 1937 Tatra T97 built in Czechoslovakia and designs by the Hungarian engineer Bela Barenyi in 1934.
By the will of Adolf Hitler, the car should make the Germans a nation of motorists. But the project turned into a military vehicle built by forced laborers.
After the Second World War, the Porsche Type 1 with steep windshield and air-cooled rear engine to an icon of the economic miracle in the Federal Republic. In 1955, the millionth Beetle in Wolfsburg ran off the line. There he was replaced in 1978 by the Gulf. In Mexico, however, production of the original beetle continued until 2003.
Unlike in Germany the beetle was in the United States in the 60s a symbol of a hippie counterculture. The agency Doyle Dane Bernbach advertised the vehicle with high recognition value with the slogan “Think small”. That had success: 1968 led Volkswagen 40 percent of its beetle production in the United States.
In Germany left Porsche’s grandson Ferdinand Piëch when VW-Chef the beetle back in 1998 in the form of the New Beetle produce. It was based on the Golf’s platform and was reworked in 2012.
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70 years old beetle
The Beetle with the production number 8032 was built on May 20, 1942.