Ben Pon, VW’s exclusive distributor for the Netherlands, and father of the VW Bus, tried to sell two 1949 VW’s in New York in 1949. That didn’t work out so well; he had to trade the second one for his hotel room or something like that. But in 1950, VW returned, and this time with a better backed effort. It was a slow start, but one that grew steadily until 1955, when sales started to explode.
I can visualize the reaction of the average Popular Science at the time. Especially if their war service had them in Europe.
Whoulda thunk?
My Father was a bit young for WWII, but he was in the National Guard in 1950 when the Korean war broke out. He was “Federalized” and likely would have gone to Korea except for a train collision….he had been sent on ahead to Camp Atterbury (on the way from Pennsylvania) to prepare for the transit, but the rest of his group was in a train accident in West Lafayette, Ohio, where many who had survived WWII but stayed in the Army were killed (a passenger train collided with their troop train). I’m not exactly sure it was because of this, or his demolition training, but he ended up getting revectored back from Seattle to the east coast and eventually went to Germany where he was on the border of (then) Czechoslovakia.
There he drove many different vehicles, REO trucks, some Jeeps, but also VW Beetles, so he likely drove one like the one described in the article (but more basic, not the import model). Many years later, his first “2nd” car was a used ’59 Beetle (import model) but it was a rust bucket, and eventually totalled in front of our house when a teenager living at the end of our street plowed into it while it was parked (we only had a 1 car driveway back then). He replaced it with a new ’68 Renault R10 he bought at Almartin motors in South Burlington.
Never got to drive his beetle, I was too young (missed driving the R10 by a month or so). but rode in it many times. My Dad was a golfer in those days (don’t remember where he kept his clubs?) and remember riding with him in it at the golf course and (as a treat) taking it over to “the Tower” for pizza and make-it-yourself sundae. Remember him stalling out on the side of the road and having to pull the reserve lever to get enough gas to get to a gas station to gas up (no fuel gauge in the ’59). The R10 was probably a luxury car in comparison…it was a 4 speed as well. My mother tried to drive the beetle one time in an emergency (don’t know why, my mother usually had our F85 Wagon but guess my Dad had it for some reason) and she wasn’t comfortable with a manual, left it on the side of the road up our street in frustration, as she was probably scared to venture onto more major road (North Avenue), probably on the way to the grocery store (too bad I didn’t know, I walked by that same store on the way to/from school, maybe could have picked up what she needed…she was taking care of my middle sister, who was only months old at the time, so she couldn’t make the walk herself without leaving my sister with a neighbor or something).
A friend of my dad bought one of the first Bugs imported to Canada back in the early Fifties and kept it for two years. The salesman told him to just try to break it. He apparently drove it quite hard and in the time he owned it he never had a problem with it beyond normal maintenance items. Speaking of Ben Pon, there’s an interesting documentary about the VW Bus, and his son shows his father’s original sketch -now framed.
oil cooler??? This must be a spacecraft, not a beetle.
Pon still has a footprint in the US, with two wheels not four, as the corporate owner of the Santa Cruz and Cervelo bicycle brands. They employ hundreds of people in my town, one of the largest non-education, government or healthcare employers.
Not only bicycles (in the US):
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.pon_north_america_inc.201f6f28597f66fedb78e964fa6066c5.html
Not to mention wine. Though this is a personal Ben Pon enterprise, not corporate.
https://www.bernardus.com/
Interesting! I didn’t know that. Pon gets mentioned often in auto history articles, but I’d never heard that he turned to manufacturing. Most of those early importers just continued selling other products.
This is just two years after the British supposedly offered Volkswagen to Ford Motor Company for nothing.
After surveying the operations, Ford Chairman Ernest Breech is said to have told Henry Ford II, “I don’t think what we’re being offered here is worth a dime.”
An oft-told quote. However, Ford also had its own bombed-out holdings in Germany to repair, and its British and US factories had to be converted back to car production from war materiel. I don’t think Ford’s management was ready to take on another bombed-out factory making a funny-looking, crude vehicle.
It’s much more complicated than that. There was a serious effort to have Ford Cologne merge with VW, and create essentially a new company. HFII came over in March ’48, and even drove a VW. He said it was not suitable for the US, but he clearly saw its potential in Europe. he was quite in favor of the proposal to merge with VW.
Discussions were held with Nordhoff, a former GM exec at Opel who had just recently been hired to run VW. He agreed to running the new JV. More discussions; then Henry Breech and other execs came back for more talks.
The main reasons why it didn’t happen:
The reparations period was over. During that time, Ford could have asked for the contents of the plant, and likely gotten it. But that window closed, and the Allied Property Control had serious doubts that they could transfer control of VW legally anymore.
Ford Dagenheim (UK) execs (rightfully) were concerned that the VW, if allowed to be exported without controls, would negatively affect exports of their cars.
Did Ford really want to be a minority partner in a new German car company, and in essence lose control of its Cologne ops, by merging them with VW?
But the biggest reason was the currency: Once the new DM arrived later in 1948, everything changed overnight. The thousands of VWs stashed away in the basement of the plant suddenly were in great demand, and could be sold for good money. Nordhoff realized that he was in charge of a potentially very lucrative car company. Why risk that now? He started giving Ford the cold shoulder.
And legally, it just would have been difficult to implement. VW could not be sold anymore, but the merger plan with Ford might likely be away around that. But it was politically complicated. And nobody at Ford was that enthusiastic about it enough to really push for it. It mostly just died a death from lack of momentum.
Just as well; there’s absolutely no doubt that Ford would never have been as strong behind the VW as the Germans themselves were.
Had to look up flivver, according to the Google:
“a cheap car or aircraft, especially one in bad condition.”
And there kinda was a Ford Flivver aircraft.
“The Ford Flivver is a single-seat aircraft introduced by Henry Ford as the “Model T of the Air”. After a fatal crash of a prototype into the ocean off Melbourne, Florida, production plans were halted.”
I always knew it as slang for a model t
Very common slang for the Model T.
Here too, universally.
Almost surprised PS didn’t call it the “Fascist Flivver”, but, given old Henry’s unfortunate proclivities, it mightn’t have been entirely clear which car they were talking about.
I had to Google it too!
I was born in 1960 and whenever the VW was mentioned my father would have some harsh words, and tell us we were never to get into one. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, I am sure a headline like “Hitler’s Flivver” would not have gone over well. He also found the TV show Hogan’s Heroes offensive (a comedy about a Nazi POW camp). I don’t know what kind of brainwashing was going on in 1950s America to rehabilitate the image of Germany.