CNN
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In today’s world of self-driving cars, keyless ignition, and charging ports, it’s hard to imagine how big It was once a small two-door Volkswagen Beetle.
But in Mexico, where the last Beetle rolled off the production line at Volkswagen’s main Puebla plant in 2003, the daring car lives on. Reinvented and revitalized by its cultural heritage, Mexico is one of the few places left where a taste of Beetle fever still exists.
The car’s colorful, curvy exterior and air-cooled rear engine propelled it to a level of fame and status that no gasoline-powered car will ever reach again. While the fond stories of the beloved car linger in our memories, what happened was It was once the best-selling car in the world. Almost all of the cars disappeared from American roads, consigned to automobile museums and collector car shows.
Patrolling the sprawling streets of Mexico City, traversing the treacherous mountain roads of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte, and operating as a modified food truck serving Mexican dishes, Fucho, as the beetle is known in Mexico, has never left the stage.
“When I hear the Fucho engine, I see my wife waving goodbye to me on her way to the stores,” Jesus Delgado, president of the XME Volks club, told CNN moments before he was interrupted by the Fucho’s distinctive roar as it arrived at Volkswagen’s largest event in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo. “I see the excitement on my son’s face when I take him for his first driving lessons.” Delgado’s wife died of Covid in 2020, and his children are all grown, but according to him, “the emotional memories are more real when he’s near the car.”
The first Beetle arrived on Mexican shores in 1954 as part of an exhibition to highlight Germany’s industrial growth. Sales were slowly increasing in the United States, but Volkswagen was struggling with postwar anti-German sentiment toward the car, which had been conceived under Adolf Hitler’s watch in 1934.
Hitler had commissioned the carmaker Ferdinand Porsche to build a small, affordable car, but the outbreak of World War II halted commercial production. Production only resumed in 1945, when Allied forces discovered the remains of a destroyed car factory in northern Germany, where a Volkswagen Beetle lay in the rubble.
It took a spark of brilliance from Jewish-American advertising executive Julian Koenig to turn Volkswagen around. Along with his team of Madison Avenue ad men, Koenig launched a simple, legendary “Think Small” ad campaign that shifted the American public away from expensive family wagons and toward a new reality of smaller, more fuel-efficient, affordable cars for the masses.
But no one could have predicted the Beetle’s unlikely evolution into a counterculture icon and mascot for the flower power movement in the United States.
With the outbreak of the Vietnam War, the Beetle became the embodiment of a powerful social movement that emerged from anti-war protests across America, and it continued to represent “peace and love” throughout the era, with Beetles arriving in large numbers at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. The Beetle was an unapologetically weak and simple vehicle, a symbol of the anti-capitalist structures that the hippie counterculture embraced with love. It came, in many ways, to represent everything that Nazi Germany would have hated.
By 1972, it had become the world’s most produced car, benefiting from the mainstream popularity of Disney’s “The Love Bug” and a robust supply chain that included a new factory in Puebla, Mexico, from where it was shipped around the world.
By the time Volkswagen decided to stop production of the car in 2003 due to declining sales and a desire to build more modern replacements, the Beetle had been manufactured in Mexico longer than it had been built in Germany.
Shortly after the announcement, The BBC reported: “It has become clear that her legacy will live on.”
But since then, stricter air pollution laws and rising fuel costs have gradually removed the car from roads in Europe and the United States, where the car serves out its final, venerable chapter away from the public eye, remaining a toy for the rich and famous.
In 2016, actor Chris Pratt restored his 1965 Beetle, describing it as “a dream to drive around the Hollywood Hills in.” That same year, comedian Jerry Seinfeld sold his white 1960 Beetle, equipped with a 36-horsepower engine, for $121,000, setting a world record for a Beetle. Three years later, fellow Hollywood star Ewan McGregor spent more than $30,000 converting his Beetle to an all-electric vehicle.
But in Mexico, you’re never far from seeing a glimpse of the original’s distinctive curves and rear-engine growl.
José Luis, who has been restoring Focuses for 40 years, described how he felt “deeply sad” when the decision was made to stop production of the car. He claimed that “even though parts are now more expensive and harder to find, the desire of people to own and drive them in Mexico remains the same.”
For world-renowned Mexican visual artist Betsabe Romero, the car has been a fundamental tool in her career. In her studio on the outskirts of Mexico City, Romero sits next to one of five hollow fucho structures that she will soon merge together to create a bridge representing the migrant journey.
“The Fuzhou is a symbol of our heritage and we can all relate to it,” she said. “Every car is a piece of design history; it’s a unique democracy… Many people may have a favourite building but not know the architect, or enjoy an art style but can’t tell you who or when it was created. That’s not the case with the car. We all have a favourite building, and we all have a story to tell about it.”
Modern carmakers face a huge challenge in creating a car that can command a similar level of global attention, but whether the unique status of the Volkswagen Beetle can be recreated remains to be seen.