Volkswagen Plans a Beetle Reunion--Of Sorts : Automakers: Its new car, Concept 1, will be in showrooms for American drivers before decade’s end.

What began as Adolf Hitler’s idea for a “people’s car” and eventually came to life as the Volkswagen Beetle is about to make a comeback into American showrooms.

Volkswagen showed off its new Beetle, dubbed Concept 1, at a recent Tokyo car show and announced that its Puebla, Mexico, plant will start making the car before the end of this decade, with the United States as a primary market.

Charles Ellwood, design director for the Volkswagen of America Design Center in Simi Valley, and his staff of 20 came up with a new full-size Beetle prototype almost two years ago. VW engineers in Germany then took Ellwood’s team design and did some nips and tucks and a bit of stretching so that the car could fit mass-production schedules.

VW’s engineers “translated [our] original concept very well,” Ellwood said, noting that this will be his team’s first car design to go into production. “We’re all excited.”

The car “looks great,” said Tom Shaver, senior partner at J.D. Power & Associates, who saw the VW Beetle in Tokyo and noted the big crowds staring at it. The new Beetle pushes the nostalgia button with some design hints drawn from the past, yet brings the car up to speed with new technology.

“It will touch the heart of a lot of Americans who grew up with the Beetle,” Shaver said. “This could be an attention-getter” that VW needs.

“A well-built basic small car that’s affordable, dependable and cheap to operate is as good an idea today as in the ‘60s, when VW was in its heyday,” said Chris Cedegren, analyst with AutoPacific Inc. Soon, he said, “Generation X will be buying their first new car, and this will create a huge appetite for new cars, and that bodes well for Concept 1.”

The new Beetle is three inches shorter and six inches wider than the old one. The touch of the past is in its slightly rounded wheel fenders and the curved hood and trunk lines that look like distant cousins of the original. But the new model is sporty and sleek, with a sloping windshield and stoplights that are flush with the fenders, which wasn’t the case with the old Beetle.

Ellwood says his team kept a streamlined design in mind and that the Tokyo show car sports his team’s black-tinted-glass sunroof.

The Beetle will arrive with air bags, anti-lock brakes, air conditioning, automatic transmission, a water-cooled engine in the front and front-wheel drive, and perhaps with leather seats and a CD speaker system. The old Bug, by contrast, was known for its air-cooled rear engine.

The Beetle shown in Tokyo has Ellwood’s simple interior design and, as in the old Beetle, the speedometer, temperature and fuel gauges are all in one big oval on the dashboard. But the new dash lights are what Ellwood calls a “swimming-pool-interior green” to ease eyestrain, and VW’s German engineers added cup holders next to the driver’s seat.

Although Ellwood’s team designed the new Beetle so that it could have the engine in either the front or back, he said he was rooting for a rear engine. “But it was not practical, given the cost,” he said. So the new model will use existing VW motors and transmissions.

These mark big changes for a car that had been known for its pokey engine, Spartan design, ladybug profile (hence the Bug nickname), bulbous wheel fenders and running boards. It was cheap to buy, perilous to drive in stiff winds, and it got good gas mileage. The design changes in the old Beetles were so few and far between that many parts could be swapped from year to year, making for lower repair bills.

Ellwood’s goal for the new model was to grab attention. When most Americans think of Volkswagen, he said, they mention the Beetle and the VW Bus--relics from the past--not the current car line. The new Beetle, he said, “was meant to get customer awareness.”

Since Ellwood’s first Beetle model was shown at car shows last year, more than 35,000 calls and letters have landed at Volkswagen of America’s Ann Arbor, Mich., headquarters. The response has “gone beyond our dreams,” he said.

Jerry Jess, an officer with the Arizona VW Bus Club and a lifelong VW fanatic who owns a ’62 Beetle, said that when pictures of Ellwood’s first design came out, “My wife said, ‘We’ve got to get one of those.’ ”

VW still needs to do some tinkering with its new Beetle, such as choosing an engine. It might drop in its TDI engine, sold now only in Europe, a punchy fuel-injected diesel that powers the VW Golf from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 9.5 seconds and gets 50 miles per gallon.

VW also has not decided on a name--it might be called the Beetle; it definitely won’t be called the Bug. A sticker price has not been set. Analysts advise a $12,000-to-$14,000 range. Some VW dealers hint that the new car might hit showrooms by 1997.

VW can use a hot-selling car. Although its U.S. sales are up 23% so far this year and its half a dozen models might top 120,000 in sales, that’s a small fraction of its American sales record of 569,700 for 1970. (Faced with slumping sales, Volkswagen closed the company’s only U.S. assembly plant in 1987.)

It will be a paradox, of course, if VW’s comeback is tied to an updated model of the car that started the company so long ago.

Hitler came up with the idea for a working-man’s car for Nazi Germany, something that would be his answer to Ford’s Model T and Model A. Auto engineering wizard Ferdinand Porsche actually designed the first cars and in 1937 Volkswagen was founded, and newsreels followed that showed Hitler riding around in a prototype Beetle convertible. Thousands of Germans put down deposits for the car, but it was never produced. Instead, during World War II, as its factory was pounded by Allied air bombings, VW turned the design into a military vehicle.

After the war, Henry Ford II visited the shell of the VW plant thinking he might buy the company, but he changed his mind when he looked at the pokey Beetle.

The Beetle was first shipped to the United States in 1949, but sales were slow. During the go-go years of the ‘50s, Americans wanted cars laden with chrome, brontosaurus-sized engines, power steering and gadgets, in addition to styling changes each year.

Then in 1959, an ad agency came up with the Beetle name and started calling attention to its funny shape, simplicity and fuel economy, and the car finally caught on. For years, it was the best-selling imported car in the United States, with sales cresting at 423,008 in 1968.

Ellwood, 40, owned a used VW Beetle in his native England for three years while attending college: “It was cheap, and almost nothing ever broke,” he said.

Overall, the VW Beetle is the best-selling car ever: 22 million have been sold in more than 100 countries. The car is still made in Mexico, and last year 95,600 were sold there and in Brazil.

But in the early ‘70s, the oil crisis helped a wave of Japanese economy cars--Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan) and Honda--catch on, and the Beetle finally began to seem outdated. In 1979, the last year the car was available in the United States, only 10,681 were sold.

Now the mood seems right for marketing a new Beetle. But car fashions are faddish, warns Shaver of J.D. Power, so VW needs to hurry “before buyers take their wants somewhere else. It’s time to build it.”