Volkswagen: Beyond the Beetle

What did Volkswagen produce beyond the iconic Beetle? From buses to Audi, we look at how Volkswagen evolved up to the 1980s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. And in
our last episode, we talked about the founding of Volkswagen,
how designer, engineer and entrepreneur Ferdinand Porsche and his son,

(00:29):
also Ferdinand Porsche, but known as Fiery, responded to a
call from Adolf Hitler to design a people's car and
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

(00:51):
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.

(01:13):
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

(01:34):
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,

(01:56):
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

(02:18):
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

(02:39):
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

(03:02):
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,

(03:22):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:28):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:13):
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

(05:33):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:15):
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

(06:36):
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

(06:57):
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.

(07:18):
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

(07:40):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:26):
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.

(08:48):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:29):
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

(09:50):
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

(10:13):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:58):
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

(11:20):
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

(11:42):
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

(12:05):
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

(12:25):
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

(12:47):
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,

(13:12):
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?

(13:35):
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

(13:55):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:38):
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

(15:00):
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,

(15:26):
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

(15:49):
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

(16:10):
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.

(16:33):
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

(16:56):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:39):
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

(18:01):
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.

(18:22):
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

(18:43):
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

(19:04):
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

(19:25):
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

(19:48):
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

(20:12):
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,

(20:32):
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

(20:53):
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,

(21:16):
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

(21:39):
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

(22:02):
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

(22:22):
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

(22:44):
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

(23:06):
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

(23:27):
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

(23:49):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:32):
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

(24:56):
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

(25:17):
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

(25:39):
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

(26:00):
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

(26:23):
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,

(26:45):
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

(27:05):
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.

(27:27):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:31):
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.

(28:51):
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

(29:12):
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

(29:35):
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

(29:58):
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

(30:19):
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

(30:42):
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

(31:03):
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

(31:26):
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

(31:48):
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

(32:09):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:54):
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.

(33:17):
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,

(33:38):
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.

(34:02):
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

(34:24):
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

(34:45):
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

(35:05):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:47):
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

(36:09):
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

(36:32):
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,

(36:56):
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

(37:20):
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,

(37:43):
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,

(38:07):
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

(38:29):
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

(38:49):
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

(39:11):
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,

(39:34):
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

(39:56):
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

(40:17):
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

(40:37):
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.

(40:59):
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

(41:22):
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

(41:43):
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,

(42:05):
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

(42:25):
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

(42:47):
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

(43:13):
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
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