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After eight decades, the oldest car in the history of the automobile is about to disappear. On Wednesday, the last Beetle left the production line of Volkswagen's assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico.
The trip was long and strange. Originally designed by Adolf Hitler as the "people's car" – or Volkswagen, in German – the Beetle has finally become the most popular vehicle in the world.
However, the small car came back twice from the ground, and a senior VW official suggested never saying "never" when it came to bringing the Ladybug back to life again.
Conceived by the Austrian automobile engineer Ferdinand Porsche – who will later found his own sports car business – the Beetle was first produced in 1938. By 1972, production had exceeded 15 million, surpassing model T.
In recent years, VW has been trying to boost demand with a series of new releases, but at a time when SUVs and CUVs have moved sedans and roadside coupes, the drop in sales has made the decision inevitable .
But the initial race was limited. The first Ladybug came out of the new VW factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, just months before the first plans of the Second World War. The factory was quickly converted into military production and, by the time the guns went silent, the Allies bombed it in ruins.
This could have marked the end of a very brief story if it was not for Major Ivan Hirst, of the British Army, whose mission was to revive German manufacture. He found a car that had survived the bombing and decided to put it back into production. A few years later, the first of the reborn Beetles was shipped to the United States. The buyers, tired of the monsters that Detroit was producing at the time, clicked on the mouse button.
It is the American counterculture that has really adopted the Ladybug, turning the car of the Hitler population into a hippie mobile with the Volkswagen Microbus. At its peak, the German manufacturer sold more than 400,000 ladybugs annually to the United States, accounting for up to 5% of the US market and 1.3 million worldwide.
Two decades later, production reached 21 million. But the Ladybug was already declining. At that time, it was almost an afterthought for Volkswagen, which was rolling out a wider and wider range of products, including the Golf model that had largely supplanted the Beetle.
In 2003, when global sales reached only 30,000 units, Volkswagen disconnected after 65 years of production. But the nameplate quickly got a reprieve, the automaker bowed to fans by unveiling the "New Beetle," the first full makeover of all time.
Sales took some momentum, but the New Beetle has never lived up to the success of the original. It has barely gained ground in Europe, with demand largely centered on the United States and Latin America.
VW tried to try its luck by introducing a third-generation model in 2011, which responded to complaints about the stocky nose and restricted interior of the New Beetle. The remake had a big impact when, on November 22, 2010, Oprah Winfrey announced in her TV show that she was offering a third-generation ladybug to all spectators.
But the sales needle barely moved and the small coupe quickly lost ground, as buyers began to shift from passenger cars to commercial vehicles.
Last August, VW announced the end of an era with the launch of the Ladybug "Final Edition", which would give it two special paint colors and some minor modifications to the exterior finish. Sales have actually increased this year: US motorists have received 9,398 of these cars in the first half of 2018, compared to 7,967 for the same period last year. But at the peak of the original car, VW was selling almost as much in the US every week.
Could there be another ladybug in the works? VW spends billions of dollars to switch from gasoline and diesel to battery power and has already announced plans to build a 100% electric version of the classic Microbus. Last April, at the New York International Auto Show, an all-electric dune buggy concept was revealed. In recent decades, beetles have been systematically converted into beach buggies and some analysts wonder if a fully electric version of the bug could follow.
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