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Last Of The Beetles

The car that could float. The car that could do lots more besides. The Bug that has left Bug-heads with lumpy throats.

By Aresh Shirali

Favourite bug: Bidding adieu

Daddu. The frog. The Volkswagen Beetle's North Indian nickname. And if you threw it into a well--or overboard in any case--it would float. Or so claimed sundry Bug-heads and experimenters, some of whom actually used this little car as a boat to make their point.

The Bug. That's what all Anglophiles know it as, with or without the four-letter prefix. There are, of course, dozens of other nicknames too--as you'd expect of a car that encouraged its users to 'Think Small' in its advertising. Especially one that had sold more than 21 million by the time Volkswagen's Puebla plant in Mexico (not Brazil, as some mistakenly infer) rolled out the very last of them on July 10, 2003.

It's the Vocho in Mexico, where it's still the classic taxi.
It's the Fusca in Brazil, where the car made its debut back in 1953.
The Maggiolino in Italy, where it has been a moving dome on the landscape for decades.
The Kafer in Switzerland, where the four-wheeler can still be seen rolling down an occasional hill in neutral.
The Buba in what was once Yugoslavia, where every Beetle sighting is cause for a long fulfilling sigh.
And the Lemon in adland, where geography is history and Bill is Bernbach rather than Clinton.

Film buffs, however, associate entirely different names with the car. Herbie, for example, as the car was named in the famous comedy series (Herbie goes bananas, ...goes to Monte Carlo). A Beetle, by the way, actually won the Monte Carlo rally in 1954. For others, there's no forgetting The Sleeper- the 1973 film in which Woody Allen wakes up 200 years later, finds a Beetle hidden away in a cave, and gets it going at the very first ignition twist. There's no forgetting The Clockwork Orange either, the Stanley Kubrick portrayal of a society that fixes its deviants by reprogramming their minds to excise free will.

And to think that the 'people's car' was launched in Berlin in 1939 as the Kraft Durch Freude Wagen (KDF Wagen), which translated from German means 'car of the force by means of joy'--gasp!

Now that's one helluva transformation, and that's also why the car will remain a case study in transformative marketing years and years into the future. If nothing else, that's good reason to be sad that the car has ceased production. Imagine the indignity of having to drag students to museums just to see a Bug.

Anyway, sniffle not. Volkswagen has the New Beetle to replace the old Bug, and the company's website is currently using an Apple logo to urge all 'pods' to unite ('Buy a New Beetle. Get a new iPod' says the ad). It's a terrific car, by most accounts, though it hasn't really caught the fancy of avant-garde film directors. Or even music video directors, for that matter. Just as well, perhaps. Somehow, it's easier to picture a Beetle in a relaxed Indipop video savouring the weather than an angry AudioSlave road gig demanding a demo.

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