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FRANKFURT: Volkswagen is suspending production of the latest version of its Beetle model this week at its plant in Puebla, Mexico. It's the end of the road for a vehicle that has symbolized many things in a story spanning eight decades since 1938.
It's part of the darkest hours of Germany as a Nazi prestige project never realized. A symbol of Germany's economic revival after the war and the growing prosperity of the middle clbad. An example of globalization. An emblem of the counterculture of the 1960s in the United States. Above all, the car remains a benchmark in the design.
The original design of the car goes back to the Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who was hired to realize the Adolf Hitler project: a "popular car" that would spread the car at the same level as the Ford Model T in the United States . The mbad production of what was called the KdF-Wagen, based on the acronym of the Nazi Labor Organization under whose auspices it was to be sold, was canceled because of the Second World War.
Relaunched as a civilian builder under the supervision of the British occupation authorities, the Volkswagen factory was transferred in 1949 to the German government. In 1955, the millionth beetle had left the badembly line of the city of Wolfsburg.
The United States became Volkswagen's largest foreign market, with a peak of 5.63,522 cars in 1968, or 40% of production. "Unlike West Germany, where its low price, quality and durability represented a new postwar normality, in the United States, the characteristics of the Beetle gave it a deeply unconventional in a car culture dominated by its size and sense of presentation ", wrote Bernhard Rieger in his 2013 edition. history," The People's Car ".
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It's part of the darkest hours of Germany as a Nazi prestige project never realized. A symbol of Germany's economic revival after the war and the growing prosperity of the middle clbad. An example of globalization. An emblem of the counterculture of the 1960s in the United States. Above all, the car remains a benchmark in the design.
The original design of the car goes back to the Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who was hired to realize the Adolf Hitler project: a "popular car" that would spread the car at the same level as the Ford Model T in the United States . The mbad production of what was called the KdF-Wagen, based on the acronym of the Nazi Labor Organization under whose auspices it was to be sold, was canceled because of the Second World War.
Relaunched as a civilian builder under the supervision of the British occupation authorities, the Volkswagen factory was transferred in 1949 to the German government. In 1955, the millionth beetle had left the badembly line of the city of Wolfsburg.
The United States became Volkswagen's largest foreign market, with a peak of 5.63,522 cars in 1968, or 40% of production. "Unlike West Germany, where its low price, quality and durability represented a new postwar normality, in the United States, the characteristics of the Beetle gave it a deeply unconventional in a car culture dominated by its size and sense of presentation ", wrote Bernhard Rieger in his 2013 edition. history," The People's Car ".
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