You can’t beat a Beetle

Say what you like about old Adolf Hitler, he did have a couple of good ideas. One was to create a network of highways connecting major cities, which became the autobahns, and the second was to create a car that ordinary people could afford to buy and drive on them.

It’s odd now to think the car that came from that brief is a type of German car that we’d now consider least suited to autobahn travel as we know it today, but its world record sales of 21 million showed it was suited to roads almost everywhere else.

Yet at the time — 1934 — Hitler’s brief for a worker’s car that could do 100km/h, transport four people, consume less than 7 litres per 100 kilometres, and cost less than 1000 Deutschmarks was inspired. Hitler entrusted the design to Ferdinand Porsche.

That brief was for fairly brisk performance for its time but both men knew it could be done. Both Hitler and Porsche were on more than nodding terms with Czechoslovak car builder Hans Ledwinka. He was responsible for many