for those of you that didn't see this..

[mperkins]

washingtonpost.com
Love for the Bug Runs Out
VW to Close Last Classic Beetle Assembly Line

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 23, 2003; Page A01


PUEBLA, Mexico -- Goodbye, Herbie.

The iconic Volkswagen Beetle, the most popular car ever made, will cease production this summer, 69 years and more than 21 million sales after Adolf Hitler's Third Reich first commissioned the durable, dome-shaped little "People's Car."

Volkswagen officials said earlier this month that the last Beetle assembly line in the world, in VW's massive plant here in central Mexico, will shut in the coming weeks. They said sales had fallen dramatically because the $6,800 workhorse could no longer compete with slick little imported Fords and Chevys that are priced nearly the same but offer four doors, air conditioning and engines that don't sound like can openers in distress.

"My heart is sick," said Antonio Cholula Olvera, who has assembled Beetles for 40 of his 59 years, watching a line of unpainted Beetle bodies waiting for their chassis to be welded on. "It's a beautiful car. Everybody loved it. Maybe I love it too much."

The bug-eyed Beetle has always been a powerful symbol. First mass-produced in Germany under Allied supervision in 1945, it represented the first flicker of the country's postwar rebirth as an industrial power. In the United States in the 1960s, the Bug and its toaster-shaped cousin, the VW bus, became the anti-establishment transport of choice. Its iconoclastic "beep-beep" was the automotive equivalent of Woodstock, the perfect way to stick it to Daddy and his big square Detroit dullmobiles.

The 1969 goofball classic movie, "The Love Bug," about a Beetle named Herbie, spawned fan clubs and books and gave the world a reason to ponder Buddy Hackett. Beetle owners around the world still hold weekend meetings and road rallies -- there are 80 clubs in Mexico alone. A couple of days ago, there were 1,057 Beetle-related items available on eBay, from a mint condition 1979 Bug for $5,000 to an "awesome" Beetle cookie jar for $12.95.

No other model of car has been so enduring, said a spokesman for VW, Thomas Karig. He said Toyota Corollas and Volkswagen's own Golf may have sold more over the years, but all have changed sizes, shapes and styles many times. Beetles rolling off the Puebla assembly line today are basically identical to the model designed by the legendary Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s. Karig said the closest phenomenon to the Beetle was the Ford Model T, which sold more than 15 million cars.

Generations of people around the world learned how to drive following the gear pattern printed on the Beetle's ashtray, had their first kiss in a Beetle or drove off to college in one. Alma Gutierrez had a baby in a vocho, as they are known in Mexico. Twenty years ago, the Mexico City housewife was rushing to the hospital in a Beetle taxi when her daughter arrived right there on the vinyl back seat.

"So how can I not love vochos?" said Gutierrez, who, like almost everyone interviewed here, brightened when asked for their favorite vocho story.

Volkswagen will continue to make the stylish New Beetle, which it introduced in 1997.

The company stopped producing the old Beetles in Germany in 1978 and in its second-biggest production line, in Brazil, in 1996. That left Puebla as the only plant in the world still making the classic car. Marcos Bureau, editor of Vochomania, a Mexican magazine that sells 35,000 copies every two weeks, said Mexicans have adopted Germany's Beetle as a symbol of Mexico.

"It's a beloved car here," said Bureau, adding that surveys have shown that at least 70 percent of Mexican families have owned a Beetle.

Bureau said the Beetle's ruggedness and ability to squeeze into the tight spots on crowded streets made it the perfect car for Mexico, whose poorly maintained roads eat lesser cars for lunch. Bureau recalled a time when his father-in-law took off his sock and stuffed it into the leaking gas tank of the family Bug. "No other car is so easy to maintain," he said.

There is a joke in Mexico that Beetles are like bellybuttons: Everyone has one. And everyone has a story. Arcelia Rebollar Martinez swears that her uncle's Bug floated one day. She said her family was on vacation when a massive downpour flooded a rutted Mexican back road. They drove into a waist-deep puddle. "I swear on my mother, the little vocho floated," Rebollar said. "The vocho is a battle car, and nothing can stop it."

Nadia Barceles, 25, a Mexico City architect, remembers 11 members of her family squeezing into their vocho for the half-day road trip to Acapulco. "It was a mess of arms and legs," she said. "We had to keep stopping to stretch."

While Bugs have become a rarer sight on the streets of the United States and Europe, they still dominate in Mexico. It is impossible to drive in Mexico City and not be surrounded by Beetles, especially the tens of thousands of bright-green ones that make up the heart of the city's taxi fleet. Bugs here serve as everything from police cars to delivery wagons and are found everywhere from the heart of the capital to the jungles of Chiapas state.

"The Beetle motorized Mexico," said Karig, the VW spokesman, adding that 1.7 million vochos have been produced at the Puebla plant since 1964. He said that until the 1990s, the Beetle was the cheapest car available in Mexico, where half the population lives in poverty. So, he said, for decades it was the only practical choice: "It had no competition."

But as the Beetle stayed the same, the world kept changing -- a disastrous combination, Karig said.

"The Mexican auto industry has changed completely since the beginning of the '90s," Karig said, noting that before the 1990s Mexico's market was largely closed to imports. As one of the very few foreign companies producing cars in Mexico, Volkswagen cornered the market with its cheap vochos.

But since then, Mexico has opened its economy to the world, first with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and later with trade pacts with Europe and South America. Mexican consumers are now flooded with all models of imported cars -- including subcompacts that are nearly as cheap as the vocho but much more modern. Karig said VW's own Pointer, which is imported from Argentina, outsells the Beetle. He said it has more room and more power for just $700 more than a Beetle.

Volkswagen has produced 625,000 New Beetles since 1997 in Puebla, its only plant in the world making that model.

In the face of all those market forces, production of the old Beetle has fallen to just 23,000 last year, from its peak of more than 100,000 in 1993. Of the 10,000 workers making cars at the plant here, only 270 are still working on vochos. "So the time has come for the Beetle at last," Karig said. "This discussion has been going on for years. And the conclusion is that people want to buy a modern car."

Mexico City authorities also have started a program to eliminate vochos from the taxi fleet, saying that newer four-door taxis are safer and more efficient. Hundreds of the old cars have already been retired and destroyed as the city phases out a symbol of Mexico City that has been used in millions of posters, postcards, photos and advertisements.

"We know there's going to be nostalgia because the vochos are disappearing," said Mario Alberto Medina, a spokesman for the city's transportation department. "But we have to establish priorities."

On the assembly line here in Puebla, workers are preparing a special farewell edition of the Beetle, to be unveiled on July 10 with surprise colors and styling. Benjamin Perez Morales, who has been making vochos for 32 years, stood on the production floor where the vocho assembly line runs beneath a huge shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint.

"I'll be relocated to another line," Perez said. "But the vocho has been my whole life. And it will always be my whole life."

Maurice
1980 SC Coupe

[Tim Walsh]

woaw.. nice write up..