VW TRIVIA

- By Herschel D. -

1.      Q:  In what year did the beetle Sedan get cooling vents added to the engine lid along with the ones that were already in the body above the lid?  

A:  1970.

2.       Q: What was the life span of the VW’s creator, Ferdinand Porsche?

A:   1875-1951.Happily, he lived long enough to see the streets filled with his Beetles. Of course the VW wasn’t just his invention, alone, the engineers that worked with him had everything to do with most of the creation of the cars components. Only parts of the car were actually engineered by Porsche, for the rest he was the manager that controlled what was chosen and the guide that urged some ideas, his and other’s into fruition. He, like most other engineers looked over each other’s shoulders for knowledge of what research had already been done, too. Even Hitler’s ideas influenced the car.  Saying that, I always like to dispute the notion that the VW was “Hitler’s car.” This is because Porsche had dreamed of making a “people’s car long before Hitler had ever entered the picture and Porsche had tried, unsuccessfully, to get the idea into production before he landed the chance to build one by way of Hitler’s propaganda-purposed government funding.   However, Porsche was not the first one Hitler had approached. The first person, Joseph Ganz, that Hitler had chosen had also already done some people’s car designing. Later Joseph Ganz, (with some, limited legitimacy) laid claim to being the first creator of a people’s car design. His design even got some limited production, but then, Heir Ganz, the publisher of a popular German automobile enthusiast’s magazine, turned out to be Jewish. I like to point out that Porsche was very non-political, and helped several Jewish engineer colleges escape Germany during the 1930’s.  Nor can Porsche be blamed for the Nazi use of slave labor at the VW factory during WWII. There is only some “good,” although, obviously, not nearly a justification, in that, depending upon their ethnic background, some, only some, of the slave workers were treated much better than they would have been had they been left back at the concentration camps. Some were even paid!

3.   Q: The first ever Porsche had a lot of VW parts in it. When was it made? 

A: 1948. It was the first Type 356 and it was a one-off, mid-engined open roadster.

4.   Q: VW ran a TV commercial that featured a cartoon Beetle running around and getting compared to the over chromed glitzy American cars of the time, who was he?

  

      A: Well, actually, this question got miss-worded by way of an unreplaced deletion. I meant to ask you who was the famous narrator of the ad?  The answer is Boris Karloff, If some of our younger readers don’t know who that is, he starred as the monster in the original 1932 Frankenstein movie as well as lots of other mystery and horror films after that.

5.   Q: Was the WWII Kubelwagen a 2 or 4 wheel drive?

A: This is an easy one, 2-wheel! It had a reputation for excellent over land traction because of its light weight and reduction gears.

6.   Q:   You should know this! What car did VW beat the production record of?

A: The 15 million October 1908 to May 1927 Model “T” Fords. VW’s Beetle reached that record on February 2, 1972. The exact record was set at 15,007,034. Ford disputed the record by digging up some evidence of a little further out put not previously accounted for, but that was whipping a dead horse, because the Beetle soon exceeded those figures, too! 

1.  Did the VW Beetle have the same cult status in its homeland that it enjoyed in the U.S.A?