Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Hirst, though, was not deterred, and painstakingly brought the factory back to life, scavenging parts and machinery from nearby industrial plants. He brought in new automotive experts: first, an RAF officer, Richard Berryman, who had worked for GM, and then, in 1947, a nativeborn German, who provided him with the managerial experience the plant so badly needed.

  Heinz Heinrich Nordhoff had been technical director for Opel before the war. He had been partly responsible for the introduction in 1936 of their successful small car, the Kadett, and by 1942 had been made head of the Opel truck factory at Brandenburg. In 1945, however, he was tagged as a Nazi by the Americans to whom he surrendered. (Just before the war’s end, Nordhoff had prudently fled westwards and attached himself to Opel’s Rüsselsheim factory, in the American zone, rather than remain in Russian-held Brandenburg.) As a result, he found himself reduced to managing a local garage.

  Despite Nordhoff’s initial scorn for the VW – ‘It had more faults than a dog had fleas,’ he famously claimed – and his brittle personality, Hirst recognized that the former Opel executive was the man for the job, and appointed him VW’s managing director. Soon Nordhoff, too, recognized what Hirst had seen in the car’s potential. (‘Once the fleas were gone,’ he later declared, ‘we found we had a pedigree dog.’) Under Nordhoff’s guidance, production of VWs topped twenty thousand in 1949, the year in which the British military government handed the plant back to the new West German authorities. He also resisted takeover attempts from his former employers at Opel.

  Over the next two decades, Nordhoff ensured that the VW workforce shared in the model’s success, keeping their wages high, involving them in senior management, and providing them with numerous benefits. The former Volkswagen sceptic became its biggest fan and built assembly plants across the world, from Brazil to the Philippines to New Zealand. By the 1960s, indeed, Nordhoff was widely criticized for being overly obsessed with just this one model. It is surely significant that VW’s breakthrough replacement, the Golf, was introduced only after Nordhoff’s death.

  Nordhoff made the VW into a worldwide phenomenon, and one of the most influential cars of the century. It’s nickname, ‘the Beetle’, was soon being used semi-officially, although it was also known in Germany by a variety of designations according to engine size (1100, 1200, 1500 and so on) and simply as the Type 1 in the rest of the world. In 1967 the American arm of VW bowed to the inevitable and began referring to it merely as the Beetle. And when Porsche’s design concept was reworked on a Golf platform in 1998, the result was called the New Beetle.

  The first postwar VWs betrayed their military origin. Their high clearance, for example, had been devised for use on the Russian front. But by 1946 they sat lower, and soon were provided with hydraulic brakes (1950), a ‘sunroof’ (actually a folding canvas strip), synchromesh and quarter-lights (1952), one-piece, oval rear windows (1953), and twin exhausts (1955). A coupé version was introduced in 1955, made by Osnabrück-based car maker Wilhelm Karmann (who had already made a cabriolet version for VW in 1949), with a body designed by Ghia of Turin. A microbus version of the Beetle, the legendary, cavernous Transporter – a van-cum-bus, forever associated with the hippies of the 1960s – appeared as early as 1950, having been adapted from the standard, rear-engined Beetle saloon by VW’s Dutch importer Ben Pon.

  As its price decreased, so the Beetle’s success spread. In 1947 the first export Volkswagen was sent to Holland, and by 1952 41.4 per cent of all Beetles were being exported. By the mid-1950s the Beetle was America’s favourite imported car, and in 1954 Volkswagen became, for a time, the fourth-largest car manufacturer in the world, after America’s Big Three.

  Wolfsburg’s astonishing success soon attracted the attention of the Russians. The Soviet zone border was only a few miles to the east of the city and as relations deteriorated between the Soviets and their former wartime allies, Stalin’s government began to cast covetous eyes on the phoenixlike plant. In 1948 the Russians even proposed that the border between the Russian and British zones be moved five miles to the west so that Wolfsburg would come under their control. Unsurprisingly, the British military government strenuously objected. The plan was shelved; instead, a year later the Soviets attempted to isolate allied-occupied Berlin from the West.

  As the Beetle’s fame spread, so the model’s phenomenal sales encouraged the ever-cautious Nordhoff to stick to his policy of producing just this one model. In 1954 he declared that, while ‘unfounded rumours arise of a new Volkswagen, the blessing lies not in bolder and more magnificent new designs, but in the consistent and tireless redevelopment of every tiny detail until perfection is achieved, which is the mark of a truly outstanding car’. In 1957 he was even more candid, comparing the whimsical design excesses of the American giants with the evergreen, homespun virtues of the plain VW: ‘I am far more attached to the idea of offering people something of genuine value, a high-quality product with a low purchase price and an incomparable resale value, than to be continually pestered by a mob of hysterical stylists who try to sell people something which they don’t really want.’

  By 1960 VW production accounted for 42 per cent of all cars made in West Germany, and VW became a public company. The firm had already been building homes in Wolfsburg for its plant’s workforce since 1953, and in 1961 the Volkswagen Foundation was launched to conduct technological research. The same year, sales of the VW reached the five million mark, and a new, upgraded, 1500 variant was launched. Three years later, VW felt confident enough to mount a successful bid for Auto Union, and afterwards converted the latter’s Ingolstadt factory to VW production.

  Noisier than its British and French competitors on account of its air-cooled engine (which did dispense with the laborious practice of topping up the radiator), the Volkswagen saloon outperformed fifties rivals like the Morris Minor and Renault Dauphine in almost every area. While British and French customers were understandably reluctant to buy this German machine in large numbers, Americans had no such compunction. Nordhoff prioritized exports to the US, and persuaded Chrysler to sell VWs from their showroom network. He also argued, somewhat convincingly, that the success of the cheap but reliable VW was a demonstration to America of West Germany’s economic recovery, which would encourage further American investment in the young nation. In 1955, the year in which the millionth VW rolled off the Wolfsburg assembly line, thirty-five thousand Volkswagens were sold to America, making the US Wolfsburg’s most important foreign market.

  The decision by Carl Hahn, VW’s inspirational American chief after 1959, to hire advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) to produce campaigns of refreshing honesty and humour, helped to establish the Beetle as one of America’s favourite cars during the sixties.1 Shrewdly, DDB’s campaign never mentioned Germany, and obviously avoided all references to the car’s Nazi origins; instead, it emphasized the car’s frugality, fun and lack of pretence. As a result, the Volkswagen became the first American ‘people’s car’ since Ford’s Model T. As early as 1960, Americans had bought their half-millionth Beetle, and by 1971 annual sales in the US were topping 1.3 million. In 1972 the Volkswagen overtook the Model T to become the world’s bestselling car of all time. Beetle production lasted until 2003, giving the model a staggering sixty-five-year lifespan.1

  Hirst, meanwhile, had left Wolfsburg for the Allied Military Security Board in Germany, where he became a regional industry director. (Radclyffe handed VW back to West Germany’s federal government in September 1949, shortly after Hirst had departed.) He later joined the German section of the Foreign Office in London, where he stayed until 1955 before joining the international secretariat of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. On his retirement in 1975, Hirst returned to England and settled in Marsden, in Lancashire. Modest and reticent, he continued to play down his crucial role in the birth of the Volkswagen and preferred to emphasize instead the importance of Anglo-German collaboration at a time when the German car maker was running rings round it
s lacklustre British rivals. To his surprise, Hirst became something of a celebrity in his retirement and was increasingly asked to drive new VW models and speak to motor historians. Before his death in 2000, VW management and the people of Wolfsburg often invited him over to guest at major civic and company events. It was at one of these that Hirst was told that the eighteen-inch scale model of a Beetle with which he had been presented when he left Wolfsburg in August 1949 (he had modestly refused a full-sized version) had probably cost more than the real thing.

  The Beetle’s original designer had, like the car itself, also managed to extricate himself from any association with Hitler’s regime. In December 1945 Ferdinand Porsche, having recently been released from an allied prison, was ‘requested’ to lend his expertise to France, the government of which had initially demanded that the VW plant be bodily moved to France as war reparations. Objections from French car makers put a swift end to this plan, but on 15 December 1945 the French authorities arrested Porsche as a war criminal and held him in prison for twenty months without trial – initially in a former Gestapo gaol in Baden-Baden and subsequently in Dijon. While in prison, as we have seen, he was persuaded to ‘advise’ the newly nationalized Renault combine on the design of the Renault 4CV.

  Porsche was lucky that he did not suffer the same grim fate as Louis Renault. Tried by the French authorities in 1947 (the highly sensitive documents regarding which have, interestingly, been sealed for 100 years), charges against him were suddenly dismissed in August of that year and he was swiftly released. Possibly Porsche had simply revealed too much about French car makers’ complicity with their German masters during the war.

  Allowed to return to Germany, Porsche’s consultancy work for the resurrected Volkswagen operation enabled him to recapitalize his own business. VW’s generous offer to sell Porsche’s own cars through its dealerships enabled him to sell small numbers of the petite Porsche 356, which his tiny workforce was painstakingly assembling by hand in an old sawmill in Gmünd, in Austria. By 1950 orders were beginning to multiply – 410 Porsche 356s had been made by the end of that year – and the firm’s future seemed rosy. Yet Herr Porsche never witnessed his company’s subsequent success. Having been presented with a black 356 on his seventy-fifth birthday on 3 September 1950, three months later he suffered a severe stroke. He died on 30 January 1951.

  Porsche’s 356 is perhaps best known today as the precursor of the legendary 911. While only a modest success in the early fifties, from 1955 the car’s sales benefited from a well-publicized tragedy: the death of iconic film star James Dean at the wheel of a Porsche 550 Spyder, a racing model derived from the 356. The fact that Dean was not at fault and was not driving fast – a pickup truck, driven by one Donald Turnipseed, drove head-on into his vehicle – was ignored by the world’s media. What caught the public’s imagination was the thrill and glamour of the incident. The wreck of Dean’s 550 was even stolen from the train that was carrying it back east.

  In 1963 Porsche’s 356 was revised and repackaged by the firm’s chief designer, Karl Rabe, as the 911,1 a car that has proved a remarkably enduring success over fifty years. Rabe and his heirs ensured that their cars retained a family resemblance to the 356 of 1948, a policy that encouraged brand recognition and customer loyalty while also helpfully distancing the company from its competitors. As a result, the much sought-after Porsche sports cars of the twenty-first century are still recognizably the descendants of Ferdinand Porsche’s postwar phoenix.

  Porsche would surely have been delighted that not only does the 911 and its progeny set the gold standard for the modern sports car, but that his humble Volkswagen brand has merged with his eponymous car maker to form one of the world’s strongest and most resilient auto combines. His life and legacy remain one of the industry’s most remarkable legends.

  1 The Bugatti firm attempted to make a comeback in 1955, but their Type 251 Grand Prix car proved a grave disappointment and the company reverted to making aircraft engines.

  2 In 1966 Hotchkiss was bought by armaments manufacturer Brandt. Hotchkiss’s last military vehicle rolled out in 1971.

  1 The equivalent of 78 mpg.

  1 2CV manufacture continued for a further two years in Portugal.

  1 In some ways those dealers were right. Not all early DSs worked as well as they looked: the hydraulic suspension system was notoriously prone to failure, as the hydraulic fluid overheated, while accessing the rear wheels and the hydraulic suspension behind the rear skirt was fraught with difficulty.

  1 The cavallino rampante logo has a complex history, deriving from the insignia of the cavalry unit of the First World War’s leading Italian aircraft ace, Count Francesco Baracca, which the count later emblazoned on his plane’s fuselage. Its yellow background derives from the coat of arms of Enzo Ferrari’s home city, Modena.

  1 This Dearborn did very successfully in the late 1960s, when Ford’s massive V-8 powered GT40s beat Ferraris in most of the major endurance races.

  2 In 2006 Fiat cemented its relationship with Ferrari by buying a further 29 per cent of the legendary car maker’s stock.

  1 It was also made under licence in England by eccentric small-car experts Trojan, part of bus and truck makers Leyland Motors.

  1 Daimler-Benz had already pioneered this system in the wartime DB601 aircraft engine which had powered Messerschmitt’s 109 and 110 fighters.

  1 Named after its author, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

  1 It also helped to cement Hahn’s own reputation; in 1982 he became chairman of the entire VW combine.

  1 Although in 1978, by which time the ageing model was faring poorly against newer European and Japanese competitors, production was transferred from Germany to Brazil and Mexico.

  1 The same year, surely coincidentally, 911 began be used as America’s SOS telephone number.

  8

  The Golden Age

  The Golden Age of the Car, effectively the mid-to late 1950s, was a fleetingly brief period of optimism, assurance and faith in the future. It was a time when the car came of age; when the automobile appeared to realize its potential and became a defining element of the modern world. More cars than ever were appearing on the world’s roads. American car manufacture soared after 1945, and the world looked to the US auto industry to set the standard for design, innovation, comfort – and fuel consumption. New car types were introduced and new market sectors invented. Car ownership in the US alone rose from 45 million in 1949 to 119 million in 1972. Everyone wanted a car, and motoring seemed to offer limitless possibilities – and few drawbacks. No one in the fifties worried about emissions, about carbon footprints, or (except in the months after the Suez crisis in 1956) about the ready supply of cheap oil. Sports cars became popular once more, but were not now merely the preserve of the super-rich. In 1957 the French philosopher Roland Barthes hymned cars ‘as the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals’, a claim that fifty years before had been made for the world’s great railway termini. Nothing, it seemed, could obstruct the onward march of the motor car.

  It was in America that the Golden Age expressed itself most sumptuously and iconically. The American car industry was in far better shape than that of Europe to react to the postwar market. American car plants had never been bombed or shelled, and had been producing civilian automobiles as recently as 1942, whereas European manufacturers had to look back to their 1939 inventories for inspiration. Crucially, too, the big US car makers – even Ford – tried to ensure that their workforces remained solidly behind them, readily agreeing with the UAW’s demands for a forty-hour week,1 and offering pay rises geared to the cost of living. Some European car makers, notably in Britain and France, were still arguing over these principles twenty years later.

  American auto producers enjoyed what the rest of the world’s car industry greatly envied: a ready-made and burgeoning home market. This gave American manufacturers vast economies of scale. In 1950 the US made 75 per cent of the world’s cars, and most of t
hose vehicles stayed at home. By 1955 American cars still represented 67 per cent of the global market, with America’s notoriously aggressive car dealers selling an astonishing seven million vehicles per year. Demand in the US was so high, and consumers’ enthusiasm so buoyant, that salesmen were able to charge as much as they felt the customer could afford. (This increasingly disreputable practice was ended in 1958 with the Automotive Information Disclosure Act, as a result of which a list price became mandatory.)

  Safety was still sidelined, because manufacturers were nervous of implying that their products were dangerous or prone to crash. Seat belts did become more common after 1953, while the spread of one-piece, wraparound windscreens and rear windows increased visibility substantially and reduced accidents. Similarly, the proliferation of fixed roofs – the ‘hard-top’ was now the rule rather than, as before the war, the exception – made fatal accidents less likely. Yet fashionable overhangs at front and rear made cars more difficult to steer, park and turn, while the fragile roofs of the newly fashionable ‘hard-top convertibles’ afforded little protection to the occupants in the event of a rollover.

  Cars were increasingly seen as objects of beauty, with engineering – and performance – invariably subjugated to style. They could now be delivered in a rainbow of colours; and from 1949 (when Buick began to paint its hard-top roofs a different hue from the bodies), two or even three colours could be employed on the same car.1 American cars, and their European imitators, grew fins and headlamps, and sprouted chrome and wraparound bumpers. They were works of art; in 1951 the historian Arthur Drexler curated an exhibition entitled ‘Eight Automobiles’ at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, canonizing the car as a valid art form. Drexler’s ‘rolling sculptures’ included a 1930 Mercedes, a 1939 Bentley, a 1941 Lincoln Continental, a 1948 MG TC, a 1951 Jeep and a 1949 Cisitalia.2 And after the show was over, MoMA continued to acquire a collection of cars that they deemed instant classics, vehicles as varied as the Jaguar E-Type, John Barnard’s 1990 F1 Ferrari, and the tiny Smart Car.