2 New Bug Books Explore the Phenomenon of the Classic and Now Reborn VW Beetle

‘Home,” wrote Robert Frost, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” The Volkswagen Beetle had a similar welcoming feeling, which Kate McLeod and Dan Ouellette evoke in these celebratory books.

As its name suggests, the Volkswagen was supposed to become “the people’s car”--for the people of Nazi Germany. Ferdinand Porsche designed the prototypes for Hitler, but the factory in Wolfsburg was converted to wartime production before any cars could be built.

Volkswagens weren’t produced commercially until after the war. The association with Hitler initially hindered acceptance of the car in America: A paltry 300 Beetles were sold in 1950, the first year of official U.S. sales.

Those figures quickly rose, spurred by a brilliant advertising campaign mounted by Doyle Dane Bernbach. One of the most famous magazine ads in that campaign consisted of a photograph of the Apollo moon lander with the caption “It’s ugly, but it gets you there.”

By 1959, sales topped 120,000, making the VW the most popular foreign car in America. In 1972, the 15,007,034th Beetle rolled off the assembly line, breaking the record Henry Ford set with his Model T.

At a time when Detroit was producing big, flashy gas guzzlers, the cheap, fuel-efficient, easy-to-repair VW became an anti-status symbol and the unofficial car of the counterculture.

On the downside, the underpowered Beetle had trouble driving up hills, and it was easy to break into. It was noisy, the heater was inadequate, and air conditioning was a rolled-down window. Still, drivers grew attached to their Bugs.

As Ouellette observes: “People didn’t just own Volkswagens, they had relationships with them.”

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Indeed, for years I drove a ’74 Superbug purchased secondhand from my friend Ron. It came with a major dent in the left rear fender and a few rust spots. I named it Baldwin after Baldwin IV, the leper king of Jerusalem. Like his namesake, Baldwin concealed a reliable heart beneath an unlovely exterior, although I got teased a lot about that car. One day, on the way to lunch, one of my friends cast an eye over it and asked, “What do you spend your money on?”

The popularity of the VW waned in America during the late ‘70s. The last Bug was built in Germany in 1978, and the last new one was sold in the U.S. in 1979. Original Beetles are still produced at a Volkswagen factory in Puebla, Mexico, but they don’t meet U.S. standards and can’t legally be imported.

The same factory also turns out the New Beetle (often referred to as the Newby), aimed at a much more upscale market than its predecessor. In 1968, a Beetle sold new for less than $2,000, roughly the equivalent of $10,000 in 1998 dollars; sticker price for a bare-bones New Beetle is a little over $15,000, and full-option models run upward of $20,000.

But for thousands of American aficionados, the classic Beetle lives on, not in the glitzy Newby but in the thousands of old Bugs restored by members of clubs across the country.

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Both these books are over-designed, with boxed excerpts from the text in different typefaces and oddly shaped photographs. The needlessly busy layouts make the text hard to read: The designers should have taken a cue from their subject and focused on practical concerns rather than frills.

Ouellette’s “Bug Book” is clearly the better work. His prose is lively and readable, the anecdotes well-chosen, the research more thorough. McLeod says less, and in less interesting ways.

Both authors note that beginning in 1938, German workers could put five marks a month into special non-interest-bearing accounts toward the purchase of a VW, then known as the KdF-Wagen, after the Nazi propaganda-leisure organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy). More than 300,000 workers signed up, depositing the equivalent of $67 million. Not one car was delivered.

McLeod ends the story prematurely, stating that at the end of World War II, the money was seized by the Soviet Union and never returned. Ouellette reports that lawsuits over the money were finally settled in 1961, when 87,000 claimants received either 100 marks in cash or a 600-mark credit toward the purchase of a new Volkswagen from the West German government.

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Incidentally, Baldwin and I eventually came to a parting of the ways when he conked out at Venice and La Brea one afternoon. I went back to look at the engine--as if I’d have any idea of what I was looking at--when the car behind me failed to stop, struck me, and I ended up with a cracked fibula and torn cartilage in one knee.

Not long after my leg healed, I got a Honda Civic. It’s quieter and more comfortable and has air conditioning. But I still miss Baldwin’s unlovely, welcoming countenance.