“Have you ever wondered,” a narrator asked over a film of a fellow driving a Volkswagen Beetle through deep snow, “how the man who drives a snowplow drives to the snowplow?”
The 1964 TV commercial, which surely someone besides me remembers, was part of a genius advertising campaign through a decade that sold a lot of the little cars to a lot of people.
The print ads were just as clever.
“And if you run out of gas, it’s easy to push,” one said.
“It makes your house look bigger,” suggested another.
And in an era when automakers routinely made at least cosmetic changes every year, Volkswagen hit the airwaves, magazines and newspapers to brag that if you washed your Beetle once in a while, your friends couldn’t tell if it was eight years old or new.
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I’m not sure how much this advertising drove my decision, but I knew I wanted the first car of my own to be brand new. So price narrowed the choices a whole lot. One ad of the time depicted a VW “bug” over a line that said, “$1.02 a pound.” And in 1969, that is about what I spent for a bright red one with black seats described as “leatherette.” (Apparently, the German word for textured vinyl.)
I was comfortable with its small size, as my brother’s first car had been a new, late 1950s green Renault Dauphine of similar dimensions. Common sense and German engineering suggested I would be better off with the VW, which then seemed about as common as a Chevrolet.
Never mind that Volkswagen’s mass availability as the “people’s car” was part of Hitler’s plan for a competitive Germany. If that mattered, heck, Hitler paraded around in a Mercedes. And Mitsubishi built the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor.
Some engines of the 1960s still came with “break in oil” that in my case needed to be replaced after 600 miles. My car was delivered on a Saturday, and the first oil change was on Monday. It was spartan, but I loved to drive it.
One of the few luxuries, relatively speaking, was a gas gauge. (Until a few years before, the Beetle had a lever to turn for emergency fuel if the tank ran dry.) There was no heater fan. The pressure to spray the windshield washer came from a hose connected to the spare tire, which, with the engine in the trunk, lived under the hood.
Eventually, I traded the red one for an orange 1971 that must have been jinxed. It wasn’t two months old when, sitting in a parking spot, it was rammed from behind and shoved into the car ahead. Close to a total loss, but not quite.
The repair paint was never right. Not until I got a super-duper baked enamel job at a special shop. Two weeks after that, a careless driver crossed the center line on Edwardsville’s Sunset Hill and converted the whole thing into a pile of citrus-colored scrap.
Now, careless corporate steering by company executives appears to have converted the whole brand into a pile of scrap. The CEO just quit. Management is teetering.
I think it was the German engineering that got them. Designers wise enough to create a gas gauge, and to figure out how to use a tire to clean a window, were destined to evolve. Or devolve, as the evidence suggests here.
At issue is a revelation that VW rigged software on 482,000 diesel cars sold in the U.S. from 2009-15. They were programmed to recognize emission testing, and self-adjust the everyday settings long enough to pass before reverting to a mode with better performance — and up to 40 times the pollution.
The EPA and California anti-smog folks are being quite humorless about it, to the potential tune of billions of dollars in fines. That’s notwithstanding the additional cost of making the cars right. Worldwide, there may be 11 million cheaters on the road. VW’s stock has plummeted at a speed my little Beetle could only have achieved in free-fall from a cliff.
This clearly is not the most reprehensible big-auto scandal. GM, Toyota, Ford and others have been accused through the years of hiding defects that killed people. But VW is right up there for guile and gall.
I survived my Volkswagen crash, albeit with painful injuries that laid me up for a while. I expect the same outcome for the company.
If I ran the place, I’d be launching a desperate search for an old Rolodex with the phone number of a long-ago advertising agency.