It’s the end of an era. The other week, we took a moment from our busy day of VW repair at our auto garage in Cincinnati to honor the iconic VW bug. The last Volkswagen Beetle rolled off the assembly line in Mexico in July. And while our mechanics may still repair Volkswagen Bugs, it’s a little sad to know they aren’t being made anymore.
“It’s impossible to imagine where Volkswagen would be without the Beetle,” said Scott Keogh, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America. “While its time has come, the role it has played in the evolution of our brand will be forever cherished.”
Once marketed as “It’s ugly, but it gets you there,” the VW bug morphed into a symbol of what cool was. You could buy one in 1969 for just under $1,800—which translates to roughly $12,700 in 2020 dollars.
The Rebranded Bug Allowed VW Say Goodbye to the Past
It was the Beetle’s new image as uncool but cheap that helped distance Volkswagen from its historical connection with the horrors of Nazi Germany. As NPR explains:
“Volkswagen was founded as a project of Adolf Hitler, and its earliest cars,” formerly known as the Volkswagen Type 1, “were used for both civilian and military purposes. Volkswagen was relaunched by British authorities after World War II, and its car was rebranded as the Beetle to distance it from its Nazi heritage.” And this rebranding worked. Younger consumers tend to associate the classic Volkswagen Beetle with hippies and not with the horrors of WWII. In fact, “A couple decades later, the car was the anthropomorphized star of a run of movies starting with The Love Bug and on to Herbie Fully Loaded.”
Our VW mechanics were excited to see Volkswagen relaunch the Beetle in 1998—that meant we could continue doing VW repair on a whole new generation of Beetles. Though we love vintage car repair on those classic Bugs, we can’t help but get excited for any new VW that rolls off of the line.
1996 Beetle Revamp: Nostalgia Sells for A While
The newly updated Beetle helped spur VW sales in the late ‘90s. Volkswagen recalls that this updated Beetle “helps Volkswagen boost sales by some 55% in 1998.” The next year, over 380,000 Beetles are sold, which gives VW their best sales year in the US for over two decades. And all generations of the Beetle remain popular in the US for quite some time. When the Beetle is updated again in 2010, half of all of the Beetles produced are sold in the US.
The US clearly has a fondness for the updated Beetles. “The “Bug” is what the New Beetle is lovingly called here. Celebrities such as TV host and car fanatic Jay Leno are enthusiastic about the car, while German entertainer Thomas Gottschalk tools around his Malibu neighborhood in his.”
Ultimately, however, sales dipped. VW explains that“cult is not necessarily synonymous with sales.” Though people still continue to think fondly of VW Beetles, the American consumer began to prefer bigger SUVs and crossovers over the smaller Beetles. Though 600,00 of the third generation of the Beetle were sold, the Golf and bigger SUVs began to dominate VW’s sales numbers.
Will There Ever Be a Beetle Resurgence Down the Road?
And though VW claims that “there are no immediate plans to replace it,” we can’t help but wonder if there will be another new Beetle coming down the line in a decade or two. After all, VW has resurrected their Type 2 Microbus in the form of the all-electric ID Buzz, so our VW mechanics and enthusiasts haven’t given up hope yet. Regardless of what the future brings, VW Beetles are still classics. We will keep getting excited when one is brought in for VW repair, whether it is the first, second, or third version. Our VW mechanics would love to take care of your brake jobs, radiator flushes, or regularly scheduled performance maintenance. But we have to admit that we might start to get a little teary eyed—nothing can really replace the iconic Bug!
