My videos tend to be fact based. That is not really opinion, but one thing I do for
Patrons every month is I go over some of the videos which I've done and sometimes I put in
my opinion about the cars and the videos that I've done. And I thought particularly with the
Beetle one here I thought it might be an idea to maybe give you a bit of an extra bit of video to
talk really about some of the background stuff, maybe even some of my opinions
on what was going on at the time. So here goes! This is all off the cuff, this isn't scripted
and so you can see there's going to be a lot of jump cuts and ums and errs and things, because
that's why I have a script, because I'm not very good at this sort of thing! So anyway here we
go. So many thought the Beetle even in the 1940s - 1945 when it was first produced it was already out
of date. They thought the style was old-fashioned. It was a 1930s style and so people were saying
it's not really going to work. So we talk about the Beetle being replaced in the 1970s but
even in the 1940s people were thinking they shouldn't even have started making it in the first
place. But of course the style became a classic, and I suppose this happens to a lot of cars like
the Mini. Like that eventually because they're not updated eventually they become classic I suppose.
Even by the 1950s it was seen as classic, unique, individual and you can see that with
the 1950s update. The first one they tried to do which was a sort of reaction to the initial
styling. Trying to make it still look sort of like a Beetle. But as time went on they realised that
the Beetle style wasn't really going to work and they needed to have something that was a lot more
practical because the Beetle shape, although it was cute and eventually started looking very cute,
if you've been in one you know you're sort of right up next to the windscreen. It's not a very
good ergonomic design and this is a problem they had with the 1990s car. Actually I think a job
they did very well with the 1990s Beetle when they remade it, was they managed to keep something very
close to the original shape and style but it was pretty practical. It was fairly practical. They
managed to get the engine up front and they managed to give it a decent sized boot, and you
could get four people in comfort. Certainly a lot more comfort than the original car.
So another thing to look at is you look at Volkswagen today and you think well why didn't
they just remake the car. Because you think of them now as this sort of big uber rich company,
but of course hopefully in the video I tried to explain that it wasn't the case at all. They
had almost nothing. They were just running the whole company on the shoestring and that's why
they were trying to essentially do the thing they wanted to do which was try and expand the range.
They were trying to improve the car and they didn't really have
much money left over for things like redesigns. The redesign that Porsche did in 1969 really isn't
clear who started the project. There's claims that in 1966 Porsche was working on it, and then
1968 things start happening over in VW, so I went with what VW says on their site,
but maybe things were happening earlier on with conversations between VW and Porsche. I really
don't know but there's also maybe some revisionist history going on on the VW website, or maybe
they're missing something. I don't really know. Sometimes you just run out of facts and you just
have to sort of go with with what you can find. There's also conflicting information
about what happened with Kurt Lotz. So Kurt Lotz took over in the late 60s as VW CEO and
was not popular. He managed to annoy all the unions, he managed to annoy Porsche, and so
he's not very popular as far as VW history goes. So again I think maybe they there's
again there's conflicting information about who started the Porsche project and who started the
the project that became the Golf and then who killed that project and then started the
thing that became the Golf and again there's conflicting information about who did this
and again maybe because they don't like Kurt Lotz maybe they're trying to put him under the bus.
Again I don't really know. I've tried to go with the the best source that I could find on that one.
Going back to that 1969 Porsche redesign, the engine under the rear seat may also have been to
try and maximise the amount of space that you got in the car. Because remember the Beetle still had
a boot up front that people could use, and of course with this 1969 redesign they were maybe
also trying to play on the fact that with with the VWs they had this space up front.
This car would also have space in the back and so they would essentially have a lot of
storage space for the car. So maybe that's was something that they were also thinking about.
One thing I didn't mention in the video but was kind of funny is that
obviously we had these Herbie films in the 60s and 70s and they were rebooted I think in the 1990s
that Disney did, but West Germany had its own type of Herbie films. They didn't look
particularly good or high quality, but anyway those they made some as well and
they weren't Herbie they they gave them a different name.
So one thing VW really focused on which I think really worked was high quality dealerships.
When they put a new dealership for example when they went into the US and they started
putting dealerships in place they made sure that they trained the staff so that they knew
how to fix the cars. And that that was all set up before the dealership went went live. They
also made sure they were stocked with enough spares because when they started selling cars,
if any driver had a problem when they brought the car in they wanted to make sure they had a really
good user experience, and this is the problem that other particularly British car manufacturers and
other car companies had a problem with. But they weren't giving the level of service
which needed to be done and VW really focused on that, and I think that was a critical
strength that they had in those early days. They were also continually improving the car.
The car in the 50s was better than the one the 40s. The one the 60s was better than the one in
the 50s. They were constantly trying to work out how to make the car more reliable, longer lasting.
All these small parts - they were slowly improving them. So every car was better every
single year and again this was not something which other car companies were really doing. They were
trying to make the car really bulletproof. So it may have looked old-fashioned and just
really out of character with other cars at the time, but it was reliable and dependable which
is not something you can say about a lot of cars from the 1950s and 60s, and even 70s.
So as I said VW were running their business on a shoestring and they were focusing on
quality, making sure dealerships were high quality, and only when they had some cash
did they make sure that they could expand their range. And that's really what they
were focusing on - expanding the range, because they had one car, eventually two with a type II,
but really they didn't have much of a full range and it was hard to compete against other larger
car companies when you've got essentially one car. So having an expanded range made a lot of sense,
and because the Beetle kept selling there was always less of an impetus to try and replace it.
I mean it would have been nice to have updated the Beetle and of course in the 50s they tried just
a simple restyle. Eventually they tried a full update of the Beetle in the latter 50s and the
1960s, but again it was a lower priority to try and expand their range, and also make sure they
expanded sales to different parts of the world. So I think VW really focused on the
right things but they were very lucky that the public latched onto the Beetle's looks
and just gave the car a much longer lifespan than it would have otherwise have had. Obviously
it lasted decades longer than other cars had. But clearly having a development department
in-house earlier on would have been a better thing for them. They could have done more work to
improve the chassis, or certainly the engine. They were really stifled with these air cooled engines
for so long and not having their own department to be able to do some design or even of
course styling to do a potential update, they didn't have that and that was a real problem.
And of course they then spent big in the 1960s buying NSU and Auto Union and then the type 3
and type 4 were just complete failures, so there were definitely setbacks that they
had. And it would take until the 1970s when they really started firing on all cylinders by having
the Golf and the Passat and the Polo and of course Audi then started doing really well.
Another thing that they did really well which is quite underrated I think is the fact that they
did a great job on advertising, particularly in North America. Their marketing in the 50s and the
60s was very clever and got people really excited about the car. And you can look at the Volkswagen,
the longevity they've had with their cars in North America. The Golf is still on sale in the US after
what 1974 it was first put in. It's still for sale. But when General Motors tried to sell the
Vauxhall Opel Astra in North America as a Saturn it wasn't a hit, and was there for a few years
and then just disappeared. Again, maybe the advertising that General Motors did wasn't
as good as the advertising that Volkswagen did. Maybe it's something else, who knows!
You see all these different prototypes which Volkswagen produced for the Beetle. They produced
many many different ones in the 50s and 60s, really trying to work out what they want to do.
But remember that prototypes are relatively cheap to do. Actually producing a new car,
particularly a new car that has a lot of new parts to it is very expensive and can take
several years. And of course it's even harder when you don't have your own development team.
The Beetle also had this big long shadow. As time went on it became harder and harder
to try and replace it, so they really needed to have something that would sell
in a greater number or even greater numbers and the Beetle was already selling pretty well, so
whatever had to replace it had to be pretty good. Well that's about all I have to say,
and you can see from the jump cuts I'm really not good at this sort of thing,
but hopefully I got kind of my message across. So anyway in general VW did an excellent job turning
this car that really wasn't very spacious into the Golf which was really a very good spacious car and
did a very good job. So anyway I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you in the next video!