Volkswagen: Beyond the Beetle

how that led to establishing Volkswagen as a company. We also talked about how the manufacturing facility would switch gears so to speak, to go into wartime production for the German military during World War Two, how that made the new Volkswagen facility a target during Allied bombing runs, and how a British officer named Hearst campaign to return the manufacturing plant back to its originally intended purpose producing civilian automobiles. And then we talked a lot about the Volkswagen Beetle.

But there's more to cover than just the old love bug. So what else did Volkswagen the company do over the years. Well, for the first few years after World War Two, the company focused exclusively on building the Type one. That's the car that was known in the US as the aforementioned

Beetle or the Volkswagen Bug. The first priority for the company was producing cars to be used by British officials who were largely in charge of running Germany after Germany's surrender after World War Two in ninety eight, after successfully restoring the manufacturing facility to working order, the British government tried to find someone else to take over the facility. They offered it up to companies and agencies in France, Australia, Britain and the United States, but no one was eager

to take them up on it. A year later, the British military found the person to take over the operations, a man named Heinrich Nordoff. Nordoff was born in Germany and had worked for a company called opal Ope L, a property of US automotive company General Motors, during World War Two. He oversaw the production of trucks. That facility also reportedly relied at least in part on forced labor,

just as Volkswagen had during World War Two. After the war, the British military relied on Heinrich's expertise and eventually made him the managing director of the Volkswagen facility. Mainly due to the urging of Major Hearst, the British official who had taken it over, Nordoff was able to ramp up production beyond the relatively modest levels that the British military

had managed. He optimized processes, he made the whole operation more efficient, and he doubled the manufacturing output in short order and technically. It was around this time that the company would officially adopt Volkswagen as its name. It would become one of the more important manufacturing companies in the nation of West Germany, with the region of Lower Saxony in West Germany receiving a twenty percent voting stake in Volkswagen.

The company made Type one models with different engine capacities, the earliest being the modest eleven hundred cc or one point one Leader engine that worked fine for the early days of motoring in post war Germany, but it didn't quite match the expectations for people living in other markets, so the manufacturing facility began making Type one vehicles with slightly beefier engines. While operations were picking up financial limitations meant that the company wasn't really able to focus too

much on expanding beyond the Type one car. Ter ben Pone Pone was a car dealer in the Netherlands who imported Volkswagen's to sell them in his home country. He had taken over his father's business. Originally was all about selling sewing machines, but had gradually over time added things like bicycles, motorized bikes and motorcycles, and then cars to its list of products. After World War Two, he visited the Volkswagen plant and he was impressed by the Type

one vehicle. He and the company came to an agreement that would make ben Pons Dealership the first outside of Germany to offer the Type one the VW Beetle, and while at the facility, Pone saw a curious vehicle. Now, it was built on top of a Type one chassis, but it definitely didn't look like a VW Beetle. So imagine a pickup truck. Now imagine that the bed of the truck isn't behind the cab where the driver sits,

but it's instead in front of the cab. Now, remember the Type one was a rear engine rear wheel drive vehicle. So in this design you would have the engine mounted on the back of the chassis. Above the engine compartment would be a cab where the driver would sit, so the engine is essentially under the driver's seating area. The area in front of the cab was a flat platform upon which workers could put parts to transport them to other areas within the manufacturing facility. So it's kind of

like a forklift, only without the lift part. Because the platform on the chassis didn't move, it was called a plot in vagin. Pond saw this and thought, hey, you know, post war Europe is really going to need some commercial vehicles for businesses of various sizes so that everything can get up and running again. And the chassis for this little car can be used for lots of different types of builds. So Pond then starts to sketch out an idea. His design called for a small van built on top

of the Type one chassis. The driver and passenger of the van would sit up front in a cab that was at the extreme front end of the via goal and this was made possible because, again the engine for the vehicle would be in the back. So think of things like your typical school bus where that has that flat front, those style school buses. That's what this one

would be like too. In a way. The body they sketched out was essentially a box, and the idea was that such a vehicle would be able to carry a good deal of materials or passengers and serve as a light commercial vehicle in Europe. Pone also said he would want such a vehicle to weigh around seven rams when empty that's about one thousand, six hundred fifty pounds, and that it should be able to carry essentially an equal amount of weight. Now, Poe wasn't in the manufacturing business himself.

He was a car dealer, not a car maker, so he handed over his design to his contacts at Volkswagen. Nordoff and his technical director, Alfred Hessner looked over Pone's design and they liked it. They particularly liked that it would make use of a chassis that the plant was already producing. So in their mind they said, well, there would be no need to develop, test and build a new chassis, so that cuts down on the development cost

of getting into producing this vehicle. So with these bonuses in mind, they decided to pursue this new vehicle model. It took a little time to schedule a prototype because they were still in full production mode for the Type one, and they then finally got things going. It only took three months from the point where they started the process to when they could roll off a prototype. But along

the way they also learned some valuable lessons. Now, as it turned out, the weight of this new vehicle and the weight that it would ultimately hold would require Volkswagen to go back and tweak the chassis after all, because it just wasn't gonna be strong enough to carry three thousand or more pounds of weight if you're talking about a fully loaded vehicle. So they went back and built

a ladder chassis. That's called a ladder chassis because it kind of looks like a ladder, So you know how a ladder has two long rails that are connected by rungs. A ladder chassis is story of the same way. It's the chassis or the base of a vehicle, and it has those sort of horizontal rungs running across to provide more strength and more stability, so it gives the chassis

a stronger frame. Despite this unexpected cost, the project did continue and Volkswagen engineers had another challenge, how to make a Volkswagen engine power a vehicle that could at max wait top out at around three thousand pounds or um. So to do that, they looked at one of the vehicles that the factory had made during World War Two.

That'd be the kubel Wagen. Now, if you listen to my last episode, you know that this was the lightweight two wheeled general purpose military vehicles, sort of the German equivalent to the United States g and Volkswagen had produced these during the war. The vehicle, the kugol Wagon, that is, had a reduction gear system to manage torque, and so the VW engineers took that design and then adapted it for this new commercial vehicle. Now, beyond these mechanical challenges,

Volkswagen faced some other hurdles. One was that when they tested this design in wind tunnels, this boxy shaped bus wasn't shaping up to be particularly useful. The wind resistance was considerable, meaning that the engine was going to have to work even harder to move the vehicle, and thus you would waste fuel. Designers began to make some changes to the structure, including a split windshield design that was

divided down the front. Eventually all the pieces fell into place, and on November twelfth, nine, the first of the Volkswagen Type two models rolled off the production line. By the way, you should consider that date to have an asterisk by it, because this is one of those cases where I found multiple sources, all with different dates listed for that first Type two, So depending on some that figure could be off by as much as a year. But that was the one that I found that seemed to be the

most reliable resource, So again uh ish. Now, the Type two has many names. In the United States, you would typically hear it described as the VW Bus. In other places it was called the COMBI, which is short for a combination vehicle more on that in a second, or the splitty because it had that split windshield, or in Germany it was called the v W Bully, among many

other names. At Volkswagen, the comby ko Mbi version referred to a type of Volkswagen bus that had either side windows and removable seats, which meant that you could actually put passengers in there it should be fairly comfortable, or you could get a second version called the commercial that had no windows on the side. It was meant to be a cargo van, so it wasn't meant to carry people in the back. If you were in the back of one of those would be very dark and probably

a little scary. And then it would emerge in the early nineteen fifties, but here in the United States it would really take off about a decade later. It would become a symbol of the counterculture movement, and many people would associate it with hippies. Now, the funny thing to me is that the whole reason for the Type two to exist in the first place was that Ben Pone wanted a low cost, efficient vehicle to help European businesses get up and running after the war. He wanted something

that was easy to work on, easy to maintain. It was meant to be affordable and utilitarian, in other words, not fancy, not necessarily sought after, but useful. Years later, after Volkswagen ended production on the Type too, some of those early models would end up bringing huge auction prices among avid collectors and avid Volkswagen fans. Some of them sold for several hundred thousand dollars. Quite the opposite of

Ben Poem's initial vision. The Type two was an instant success in Europe, so much so that the demand actually required Volkswagen to invest in a new manufacturing facility so that it can meet its production goals for both the Type one, the beatle, and the Type two, the bus. The company selected a site in Hanover to build a new manufacturing facility, and that plant became the main center

of operations focused on building Volkswagen vehicles for the commercial sector. Now, I can't really get into every single vehicle Volkswagen had produced over the course of its entire history. Uh, there are a lot of them that only appeared in specific markets, and we're virtually unknown elsewhere in the world. So I would be spending all my time trying to blaine why a certain car would appear in certain places the world

but wasn't found anywhere else. But this one story that I want to convey next is really interesting, particularly to me, and it shows how different companies were willing to come together and collaborate when there was opportunity to tap into an emerging market. Okay, so, by the mid nineteen fifties, Europe was transitioning from recovery and into a more booming economy. You know, and immediately after World War Two, it was all about how can we get back to where we were?

Then it was we're actually prospering for the automotive industry. This meant that there was a chance to make a more upscale vehicle, something with a bit more luxury than a workhorse Type one beetle or a Type two microbus. And there were three different companies that would come together to do this with UH for the Volkswagen picture, one of them being Volkswagen, the other two i'll get into.

In fact, one of them was a company, a German company called Carmen spelled k A R M A n N. It was founded by a dude named Wilhelm Carmen, and this company traced its history all the way back to nineteen o one. Although that company was built on top of an even older coach building business that was run by a guy named Christianne Claugus. Bill Helm oversaw the coach building business transition over to an automotive industry right away. Mainly his company would build car bodies, so he would

use car chassiss that were made by other manufacturers. He wasn't building that part. He would bring the chassis and then design and build car bodies on top of it. So his business had gone into hibernation during World War Two and he essentially was not doing any of that business while the war was going on. But afterward he got back into production. And then Volkswagen placed an order for convertible tops for the Type one Beatle for variation known as the Cabriole. So Carmen and Volkswagen had a

previously established working relationship. But that was just one of the other two companies that worked with Volkswagen on this new concept. And when we come back, I'll talk about the other one, but first let's take a quick break, all right. Before the break, I was teasing about that third party. And the third party that I have hinted

at was the Italian automobile design company Carrazeria Gia. And I know I've butchered the pronunciation, as I do all languages, but this was a company that was established by Giacinto Gia at the early twentie century, and the company didn't produce cars. They weren't a car manufacturer. They designed cars. They might build a limited number of cars, but it was in a very pain staking, almost handmade kind of approach.

So Gia would work with a lot of other automotive companies designing their car bodies or sometimes just specific elements on a car. So for example, in the nineteen thirties, Gia worked on the body for a Fiat five oh eight S Spider sports car. Now, during World War Two, Carozeria Guilla's facilities were all but destroyed. Giacinto Gia wanted to rebuild, but before he could oversee those efforts, he took ill and then he passed away in nineteen four.

His company, however, would live on after his death. His widow gave the company over to Felice se Mario Boana and Giorgio albert So. Buano, in turn would later bring in a businessman named Luigi Segre, who pushed the company to make more international contracts. This ultimately led to Seregre effectively taking over Gia. So we now get to the

weird part of this story. Villhelm Carmen thought that the chassis of the Volkswagen Type one would serve as the basis for a much more sporty body than the Volkswagen Beetle, and he thought that that would be a valuable thing to pursue. However, nord Off over at Volkswagen wasn't particularly interested,

so he turned elsewhere. You see, Carmen had run into Luigi Segre several times at various automotive industry events in Europe, so he met up with Segrey to talk about the possibility of developing a sports car on top of a Volkswagen Type one chassis. There was no real hope of getting Volkswagen on board from the get go nord Off you know again, the head of Volkswagen. He was more focused on producing cars for the average European that didn't

really see the business case for more sporty vehicles. So Segre agreed to have Carozeria Gia designer prototype after getting hold of a Type one Volkswagen. They literally bought a Volkswagen Beetle and they drove it over to Guia's headquarters in Turin, and then they stripped it bare all the way down to the chassis in order to build a

brand new body on top of it. Now, this was to become the prototype for the Carmen Gia, and there's controversy surrounding who actually designed the look of the thing. If you've never seen one, you should look up Carmen Gia on the internet, and it's as I said k A R M A N N and Guia as g H. I A look it up because it's a sporty little car. I think it's adorable, really cute. And there were some who said that Mario Bolano was clearly the designer with

the most input in the design process. Other people dispute that. They said, no, it was this other designer who did all that work. And some people say, you know what, they actually pretty much lifted the design from an entirely different car manufacturer. And there's a lot of back and forth online in various car forums about this. So I just don't know the real truth here. There's way too much conflicting information out there, and I don't know who's

right and who's wrong. So rather than report on all of that, we'll just say there's some controversy anyway. So about a year after Luigi Segre had first met with Wilhelm Karmen about this project, he presented Carmen with the prototype and Carmen loved it, and he immediately said that he wanted his company to produce the bodies for this type of car using Gias design. But there was still one little piece of the puzzle that was missing. Which was the fact that they needed to get the Chassiss

from Volkswagen. So Carmen goes to nord Off and he pitches this idea, and according to Carmen, I don't know if this is actually true, but it's according to his own records of it. Nordof's first reaction upon seeing the Carmen Gia prototype was to say that it was really pretty, but way too expensive, and Carmen then said, I haven't even mentioned a price yet. How can you say it's too expensive if you haven't heard what I think it

will cost. So again, I have no clue if that particular part of the story is actually true or not, but what is indisputable is that the various parties were able to come to an agreement, and thus the Volkswagen Carmen Gia was born. Like the Type one, it had a rear mounted air cooled engine, but it definitely looked

more sleek than the Beatle. Over the lifetime of its production, which spanned from nineteen fifty five to nineteen seventy four, it would come with four different engine capacities, so at the low end you had twelve hundred c c twelve cubic centimeters or one point two leaders, and you got all the way up to sixteen hundred cc or one point six leaders. Now I'm not really a car guy, but I do have to say there's a lot about the Carmen Gia that I find particularly appealing. It's just,

like I said, cute. Plus the fact that it relied it on the same chassis and style of engine as the Volkswagen Beetle meant that it was relatively easy to maintain and to work on, which is becoming pretty darn rare these days with modern vehicles because they're incorporating more and more computer technology and proprietary bolts and stuff like that, it's harder for you to be able to work on

a car that you get for yourself. So this hearkens back to an age where people could actually do their own maintenance on their vehicles if they had to know how and the desire to do so. Oh and one other thing. Uh. The name Carmen Gia would also be used by mel Brooks as the name for a supporting character in his film The Producers, though in that case the character's name was spelled as Carmen c A R M E n UM. However, I love that movie, so

I had to give that shout out. So by the mid nineteen fifties, Volkswagen had its workhorse Type one that was doing well throughout Europe and was starting to pick up sales in the United States. It was starting to get popular. The Type two past one million cars produced by nineteen fifty five, so it very quickly became a pretty popular workhorse itself, and the karmen Gia switched things up by adding a sporty option. Volkswagen's motto around this

time was it is a member of my family. No. I like that a lot more than the motto I remember with Volkswagen, but that we'll have to say for the next episode. Anyway, the company appeared to be fulfilling

the initial promise of being the people's car. In nineteen sixty one, Volkswagen began producing a two wheel drive convertible called the Type one eight one, that's what was called internally, and it was meant as a vehicle for the Army of West Germany, and it looked like a descendant of the old Kubu Wagan that Volkswagen had been producing in World War Two. Under the surface of this angular and flat metal sheets that made up the body. The type was really similar to the Type one and Type two

mechanical systems, so very similar chassis, very similar engine. It's sported, removable and interchangeable doors, so you can take the doors off the side of the thing if you wanted, kind of like a jeep, uh, and you didn't have to worry about which ones where the front doors or the back doors because they were all interchangeable. The windshield itself could also be folded down, so you could drive this thing with no windshield up if you wanted, and you

didn't mind the taste of bugs. They would all go on the market for consumers as well as the military, and here in the United States we called it the Volkswagen Thing the Thing. You should look that up on Google Images if you haven't seen this before, because it's pretty funky looking to The company stopped producing them in nineteen eighty three, so there hasn't been a new Volkswagen Thing for a few decades. Uh. They're still collectors who set by and sell the things. Um, they go for

around sixteen thousand thousand dollars. From what I've seen, it's pretty expensive for a car that's that old and is not like a sports car, luxury car or anything like that. It's more of a curiosity. Also in nineteen Volkswagen with debut it's Type three vehicle. Now remember Type one were Beatles, Type two were the Volkswagen busses. So what the heck was Type three. Well, it's a compact car that, while larger than the Beetle, still wasn't very big. It was

still a pretty compact vehicle. It was meant to provide more space in the car for passengers and for luggage while maintaining many of the common features of the previous types. That meant the engines in the cars were still uh air cooled, they were still rear mounted, but they were a little bit bigger, you know, had a larger engine volume than the Beatles typically did, and they were in

a slightly different configuration. You see, they were in what some people call a pancake engine style, and that was because it was meant to take up less vertical space it took. It was a flat sort of engine that could fit underneath the trunk space of the back of the car. So this actually meant that the designers could create trunk space both in the front and the back

of the Type three vehicles. You could open up the front and that was storage space, and you could open up the back and there was more storage space underneath, which was a hinged panel, and if you lift up the hinged panel, you would actually be looking at the engine. So it had a lot more storage space than your typical volkswagons did at the time. Uh there were three main body styles that made up the Type three chassis. There was the fast back, the square back, and the

notch back. Now in the United States, only the square back and fastback versions were imported officially, and they became popular cars among certain subcultures, particularly the surfing community. They became really popular with surfers. Now today they are sought after by collectors because they haven't been made in decades. They they Volkswagen stopped making Type three cars in nineteen seventy three, so a lot of them just aren't in

working order anymore. So to find one that still works that's in good condition is considered a rarity, and the collectors eagerly pay lots of money to get hold of these cars. In the mid nineteen sixties, Volkswagen leader Nordhoff led the company to acquire Audi, which was previously owned by Daimler Benz. Audi has its own rather complicated story.

It was founded in the early twentieth century by a guy named August Horch, who founded a couple of different automobile companies, but Audi was the one that really succeeded. It produced its first car in nineteen ten, and over the following two decades it would merge with other automotive companies. I mean seriously. Tracing the history of some of these car companies is maddening because of the various mergers and

acquisitions and changes in ownership. And complicating matters is that, like Volkswagen, Audi produced vehicles for the Access Powers during World War Two, but unlike Volkswagen, when Germany got split into two countries into East and West Germany, Aldi's headquarters happened to be in East Germany, which fell under the control of the Soviet Union. So that meant that AUDI as a company essentially dissolved at that point, but the executives were determined to bring it back to launch it

again in a less hostile environment. They established a new center of operations in Bavaria in West Germany, at a manufacturing facility that had previously made spare parts for the company. Now it was going to be the center of their operations. In nineteen fifty nine, Daimler Benz purchased an eighty seven percent steak in Audi, but didn't really have a whole lot to do with their new purchase. Over time, Volkswagen acquired a steak which was up to a fifty percent stake.

In nineteen sixty four, when Volkswagen made a move to buy the manufacturing facilities from Audi, the plan wasn't really to nurture Audi into a luxury car brand of its own. Instead, Volkswagen intended to turn Audi's manufacturing facilities to the purpose of building yet more Volkswagen Beetle, you know, the good old type one. The Audi executives, who had worked so hard to keep their company going even after losing their production facilities to East Germany, weren't going to give up

so easily, so they did something sneaky. They secretly developed a prototype for what would become the first Audi one hundred. That was a full sized sedan, and it aimed at a slightly higher level upscale market than the Beatle did so for people who had a little bit more income and they wanted to have more space, you know, in a larger vehicle. They pitched it to Volkswagen head Nordoff once they had built the prototype, again doing it completely

without authorization. Nordhoff was actually impressed, and he agreed to add the vehicle to Volkswagen's production plans under the Audi brand name, and so Audi the Auto brand thus survived. By this time, there were people in and around Volkswagen who were growing concerned about the company. Nordoff was frequently targeted by critic They said that he was just being too conservative and he wasn't moving quickly enough to establish

new Volkswagen models and and car types. There was a worry that the company was far too dependent upon the aging Type one beatle that was quickly getting left behind by other car companies. Meanwhile, Nordoff was considering the head of Volkswagen of America, a guy named Dr. Carl Hahn, to become his successor. Nordoff was planning to retire. However, that wouldn't happen. Nordoff would have a heart attack in nineteen sixty seven, and he would pass away the following

year in April of nineteen sixty eight. That was the year he had actually intended to retire. He was going to retire at the end of sixty eight, and the company's board of directors had already chosen his successor, Kurt Lots, who was going to take over the company upon Nordoff's retirement, but obviously had to take on the job six months earlier than planned. During World War Two, Lots had served

as a general staff off serve for the Luftwaffe. After the war, he worked at the German subsidiary of a Swiss electrical company, eventually rising to the level of chairman, before differences between Lots and the leaders on the Swiss parent company prompted Lots to leave the company. He was brought into Volkswagen with the intent of replacing Nordof upon Nordoff's retirement. As I mentioned, but he would take the job much earlier, and so here's a person from outside

the organization coming in to take over the reins. Lots of vision from Volkswagen was to make much larger steps away from the company's dependence on the Type one Beatle, and so he started to authorize lots of new car models, both under Volkswagen and under the Audi brands. He wanted to consider other designs and aimed for different markets. Europe was a much different place in the late nineteen sixties than it had been just after World War Two, and

Volkswagen's international markets were growing in importance. In fact, Volkswagen had been building assembly plants in places like Australia, Brazil, Mexico in order to meet that demand, and the US market in particular was really growing pretty quickly. One interesting fact, just as Lats was looking to move away from that Volkswagen Beetle, the car hit its peak popularity in the United States. It would mark the year when the U s would buy the most Volkswagen Beetles in the history

of the country, you know, having that availability. But Lawns was right that sticking to the old type one was not going to be a sustainable business model for the long run. In nineteen sixty nine, Lots oversaw the acquisition of another company called N s U Motor in Varka.

Like Carmen, this company didn't start out in the auto business. Instead, a German businessman named Christianne Schmidt founded it back in eighteen seventy three, and it was initially a company that made knitting machines, but over time the company would relocate, it would grow, it would evolve, and it started to change its manufacturing acesses to build other stuff because clearly knitting machines were not going to remain relevant forever, and

so they started making stuff like bicycles, and then motorcycles and then eventually cars. The company didn't have an entirely smooth history. In the nineteen thirties, facing financial crisis, NSU was forced to sell its auto manufacturing facility in uh Heilbraun to Fiat, for example, and so Fiat and NSU

worked together on several vehicles. Like all manufacturing facilities in Europe, it changed over to produce supplies for the armed forces during World War Two, and after the war it went back into manufacturing vehicles for civilians, including motorcycles and cars. The company wasn't a rough patch in the late nineteen sixties when Volkswagen acquired it, merging it with the Audi division to create Audi n s U. The NSU brand would only stick around a few more years before being

discontinued completely in nineteen seventy seven. All Right, I've got a little more to say about Volkswagen's transition during the seventies. After we come Back in nineteen one, Curt Lots, who had only led the company since nineteen eight when Heinrich Nordoff had passed away, stepped down as the head of Volkswagen. Lots had come into conflict with the powerful trade unions that still owned a stake in the company, and those

differences were insurmountable. Lots Is politics and the union politics were pretty much in opposition with one another, and Lots just didn't have the ability to override the trade unions. They just they held too much ownership of the company, so he couldn't really do what he wanted to do, and he was more or less forced to resign. His replacement was Rudolph Lightning, and unlike Lots, Lighting had been

with the company for nearly thirty years. He had started his career at Volkswagen in the nineteen forties and had been in charge of establishing an assembly line process when Volkswagen was emerging from the wreckage of World War Two. He was known to be a tough boss, which is putting it lightly. He was a guy who would monitor employees coming in at the morning and making sure he made note of anyone who showed up late to work.

He had a reputation for holding people accountable for their deliverables, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the stories of Red made it sound like he wasn't exactly approachable. His goal was to have a smooth running operation, and he wasn't shy about addressing issues he saw as an impediment to that goal. So, in other words, he was a tough customer, you a tough cookie. Lighting concluded that the company had perhaps aired too far in an attempt to

get away from the Volkswagen Beetle dependency. He did agree that it didn't make sense to stay dependent upon the Type one, but he judged that Volkswagen and its subsidiaries had developed and launched cars at great expense, and those cars had limited value on the market. So, in other words, the company was backing too many ideas without really testing whether or not those ideas had any merit. So he dedicated the company to a more focused approach when it

came to developing plans for cars. Lighting also wanted to maximize efficiency by using the same basic components for all vehicles produced by Volkswagen. Doing so would cut back drastically on costs. There would be differences from model to model. You know, things would look very different, but underneath they would share much of the same bones right, the same structure. This is pretty much the same strategy Volkswagen had employed

would introduced the Volkswagen Bus decades earlier. It was in nineteen seventy two that Volkswagen announced it had produced more Type one vehicles the Volkswagen Beetle, than Ford had made of Model T cars, which meant that the Volkswagen Beetle would become the most popular or most produced car in history at that time anyway, And the following year, in nineteen seventy three, Volkswagen would introduce a new car that was a bigger departure for the company, and this would

be the Volkswagen Pasade. Now nineteen seventy three in nineteen seventy four would be really tough years for Europe in general and Volkswagen in particular. There was an economic recession that was hitting Europe pretty hard and auto sales were down as a result, and part of the cause for this was the oil crisis of the early nineteen seventies. So while Volkswagen was introducing a new type of car, it was also dealing with disappointing sales figures, and it

was pretty rough. The Passade, as I mentioned, marked a departure for Volkswagen. Now, beneath the exterior, the Pasade was essentially the same as an Audi eighty sedan, and remember Audi was now part of the Volkswagen group, but the style was different from all other Volkswagen vehicles. All of the previous Volkswagen vehicles had been rear engine, rear wheel drive vehicles. The Pasade was and is to this day, a front engine, front wheel drive vehicle, and it was

much larger. Is a much bigger car than what Volkswagen was typically used to producing, and considered to be a large family vehicle rather than a compact car. So in North America, the original Passade would be called the Volkswagen Dasher. Now this type of vehicle wasn't that different from the cars that Audi was producing, but that was under the Audi brand, not the Volkswagen brand, so that's why it was a pretty big change for Volkswagen. The Pasade didn't

immediately save the company, however. The financial crisis was hitting it hard and the company posted a loss in nineteen seventy four that was equivalent to three hundred thirty six million dollars. Now, in nineteen seventy four, I mean even today, that's a princely some the nineteen seventy four that was a pretty huge amount. And to make matters worse, it marked the first time Volkswagen had ever experienced a loss. Ever,

so it's first loss was a considerable one. Lighting would end up getting a lot of pressure and would end stepping down as the managing director of the company in early nineteen He was replaced by another guy named Tony Schmucker, who had previously worked for Ford's operations in Germany. So again Schmucker came in from outside of Volkswagen. He was not someone who had been working at the company for

a while. Before his departure, Lighting had overseen the development of the Volkswagen Golf, also known as the Volkswagen Rabbit in America. This car, which still has models that come out today, was meant as a replacement for the Volkswagen Beetles. So this was another compact car that was meant to take the same place in the market as the Beatle. It looks very different from the Beatle, but it was meant to aim at that same sort of driver, like the Pasade as a front engine and front wheel drive.

It's smaller than the Pasade, but it would ultimately become Volkswagen's best selling model. At the time, no one knew if it was going to be successful or not, And based on my research, I'd say much of the losses that Lkswagen experienced were really outside of Rudolph Lighting's control, whereas the decisions he made would end up leading to

some of the company's biggest gains later on. So while he his tenure was short, and while he took a lot of blame for the losses that the company experienced, uh, it may be more honest to say that he helped save the company. He just wasn't around long enough to see the results of that work payoff. Schmooker would end up laying off twenty five thousand employees. In nineteen seventy five,

he shut down an assembly plant in Australia. He almost did the same to the manufacturing facilities in Mexico and Brazil, but instead decided to reorganize and restructure them and make them more efficient. In ninety eight, he actually would do the reverse because now the company's fortunes were on the rise again, so he oversaw the opening of a manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania as in the United States of America.

This would make Volkswagen the first foreign car company to open up an assembly plant in the US in nearly fifty years. The reason they did this is because again, the United States was becoming an enormous customer for Volkswagen, like a huge market. They had seen incredible success with the Beatle and the Golf was starting to take off as well, so they wanted to build a facility in the same country where they were having a lot of customers,

So that's why they did that. Now, between Lighting's decisions to invest in the Gulf and Schmooker's cost cutting measures, the company returned to being profitable in short order. They were making a profit again by nineteen seventy five, so they were able to recover from the massive crisis of nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four. The Golf was poised to take up the mantle that had previously been worn by the Beetle, and Volkswagen still had a lot

of obstacles to overcome. One big one was that Japanese automakers were starting to make some serious progress in markets outside of Japan itself. Japanese cars were starting to become popular. They were known for being inexpensive and reliable, and so this was a serious threat to Volkswagen. Uh So that became a new source of competition for the company. Schmucker would remain the head of Volkswagen until nineteen eighty two, at which point he was forced to resign due to

declining health. His successor was the man whom Heinrich Nordhoff had wanted to lead the company all the way back in nineteen sixty seven, this being Dr Carl Hahn, the previous head of Volkswagen of America. He had been away from Volkswagen for several years prior to nineteen eighty two, but he did come back to assume the role of chairman of the board. Also around that time, the company signed a cooperation agreement with a Spanish carmaker called Seat.

That cooperation would blossom over the years, with the Volkswagen taking a majority steak in Seat in nineteen eighty six

before acquiring the company entirely in nineteen nine. All Right, so I'm going to kind of wrap up this episode at this point because we still have more to talk about, and I want to make sure that I cover all of it, so we're going to have a part three to this series, so we'll talk about other cars that Volkswagen produced after this time, stuff like the Jetta, which I know my producer Tari wants me to talk about

because she used to drive one. And we'll talk about the new Beatle, the the resurgence of the Volkswagen Beetle when it came back in the nineteen nineties under a new style. And we'll talk about Volkswagen's plans for the future with it's it's uh, you know, it's it's experimental steps into electric car territory, as well as of course the controversy around the diesel emissions testing scandal. So we have all of that to look forward to in the

next episode. But if you have any requests or suggestions for future episodes, you can get in touch with me and let me know what those are. The best way to do it is on social media over on Facebook and Twitter, we are tech Stuff h s W. So just let us know over there and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is a production

of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.