Volkswagen Beetle, symbol of the counterculture of the 60s, will be abandoned again

The Volkswagen Beetle – the winding car developed in the direction of Adolf Hitler who became an unlikely symbol of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s – should become a thing of the past.

Volkswagen said this week it would stop production of the vehicle in July. Sales of the model by the American unit of the US automaker, the only division to produce Ladybugs, had declined sharply in recent years. The unit plans to focus on large family cars instead.

Volkswagen ends the production of the Beetle some seven decades after the design of the car, concluding a journey in which it became one of the most recognizable models of the car manufacturer.

The original Beetle was designed for Hitler in the 1930s. At that time, only affluent Germans could afford to buy cars, and that was supposed to make cars accessible to everyone. Hitler spoke at the dedication of the gigantic factory where the Beetle was built and made a turn in a convertible version.

The car's simple design and air-cooled engine eliminated the need for a more complex water-cooled system and helped make it a successful post-war era. Its success led to the creation of Volkswagen, which is now the largest car manufacturer in Europe.

Despite Beetle's ties to Hitler, he became the symbol of the counterculture of the 1960s and the best-selling import of the era in the United States. For the Woodstock generation, driving a Ladybug or her biggest cousin, the Volkswagen van, was a form of protest against materialism and heavy gas consumers produced by major American manufacturers.

In the 1970s, however, the beetle showed its age. It was slow and its heating system was barely working. Volkswagen was also struggling to adapt the technology of the 1930s to standards of pollution more and more stringent. The company stopped producing the Beetle in Germany in 1978, although models were produced in Mexico until 2003.

The New Beetle, introduced by Volkswagen in 1997, was supposed to exploit the nostalgia of its predecessor. Both cars had little in common mechanically. Under its Beetle-type exterior, the New Beetle was essentially a Volkswagen Golf. But the car has been successful in the United States, helping Volkswagen recover at least temporarily part of its long-lost market share compared to Toyota, Honda and Honda. (In Europe, where drivers were less sentimental about the Beetle, the updated version never sold very well.)

The attractiveness of the New Beetle faded, however, as the 1960s generation grew older, and the revelation that Volkswagen had planned to evade diesel testing had detracted from the car's image. The diesel versions of the car were among the models equipped with illegal software designed to deceive regulators on car pollution.

Although in 2010, about 1.2 million New Beetles were sold when the product was introduced, annual sales had dropped to 60,000 last year.

Volkswagen has taken care not to exclude the model recovery in the future. "Never say never," said Hinrich J. Woebcken, president and CEO of Volkswagen of America.

Indeed, Volkswagen and other manufacturers have not hesitated to revisit their classic models.

■ Production of the Volkswagen van has been discontinued in the early 2000s, a range of electric cars that the company plans to introduce in 2020 includes a modernized version of the van.

■ Also in 2020, Jeep plans to revive the Grand Wagoneer, a wooden car that was abandoned in 1991.