The Man Who Made Volkswagen

It was fifty years ago today, April 12, 1968, that Heinz Nordhoff, the first German postwar CEO of Volkswagen, died of a heart ailment after devoting two decades of his life and career to the company that is now Europe's largest automaker.  His death was not as highly noted as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination eight days earlier or Robert Kennedy's assassination shortly thereafter, but Nordhoff's passing affected the automotive world as profoundly as the deaths of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy affected the world in general.

Nordhoff worked for General Motors' Opel subsidiary before World War II and had been instrumental in bringing the original Kadett subcompact to market even as Ferdinand Porsche was working to develop for the Third Reich what became the Volkswagen Beetle.  When the war ended, Nordhoff was barred from working in the American zone of occupation for having received a medal from the Nazis, and he was soon recruited by the British to run the VW plant in Wolfsburg, in the British occupation zone.  Nordhoff scoffed at the idea - he found Dr. Porsche's little Volkswagen to be a crude, cheap, underdeveloped car.  But he needed a job, and so he accepted the position.  Once he came to appreciate the Beetle's durability and versatility, he set about improving the car's performance, amenities and assembly quality.

Heinz Nordhoff, more than anyone else, made the Beetle a cultural icon all over the world.  His attention to detail made the Beetle a solid, reliable car that everyone could afford, and its simple engineering made it easy to maintain and economical to run.  The Beetle's derivatives - larger sedans and the iconic Microbus - expanded Volkswagen's reach and made the brand the most loved car make on the planet.  And it almost singlehandedly revived the German economy.  At the time of Nordhoff's death, the Beetle was at its peak both mechanically and in U.S. sales.  But VW in 1968 was rising toward a fall.

The company was suddenly facing serious competition from Toyota in the import-car market in the United States, with Toyota's new Corolla being more modern and advanced than the Beetle was.  New product was needed to compete both in America and in Europe.  Nordhoff's immediate successors as CEO of Volkswagen wasted little time in developing new vehicles to replace the Beetle and its derivatives, but these men lacked one quality that Nordhoff had in spades - vision.  Volkswagen eventually came up with a new generation of cars - with engines cooled by liquid mounted in the front and driving the front wheels as opposed to the Beetle's rear-mounted engine cooled by air and driving the rear wheels - but many observers believed that there was no sense of distinction and no uniqueness to separate them from the competition.  Such distinction would take years, in some cases decades, to cultivate. And the teething problems that came from Volkswagen making cars with next to no experience in liquid-cooled, front-engine vehicles (what expertise it had came from its purchase of the Auto Union and NSU car companies in the sixties) compromised VW's reputation for quality.  The lack of vision and the failure to recognize a need for VW to preserve a unique identity led to many years being lost, particularly in the American market, where the "Asian tsunami" of Japanese and South Korean cars left Volkswagen and other European makes struggling. Some of them, particularly the French makes, just gave up in the States, and VW almost did as well.

Ironically, Nordhoff himself may have been responsible or VW's post-Beetle woes by refusing to give up on the Beetle even after its engineering became dated.  And even had he lived, he wasn't going to be with the company for much longer; at 69, he was planning to retire in the autumn of 1968.  But Volkswagen painfully felt his absence once he left the scene.  The Golf might have saved the company from disaster when it finally debuted in the mid-seventies, but one question remained for the automaker's executives that Nordhoff wouldn't have had to ask.  What, in this new era, was a Volkswagen? Was it still an everyman's car?  Was it a performance-oriented driver's car?  Was it a medium-market car for a prosperous upper middle class?

Volkswagen is all of these things, of course, but the one thing it is, and should be, above all else is this.  It's an honest value.  It's a car that offers a lot for the money with a pleasurable driving experience.  It's a quality that Nordhoff picked up as soon as he took over Volkswagen from the British.  "Offering people an honest value," Nordhoff once said, "appealed to me more than being driven around by a bunch of hysterical stylists trying to sell people something they really don't want to have."

It's a quality that almost got lost due to the lack of vision that persisted at VW or for so long, which undoubtedly led to substandard reliability in its cars, higher retail prices and maintenance costs, missteps like the Phaeton luxury sedan, and, ultimately, the diesel scandal.  It was a quality Nordhoff adhered to, lest he let VW get complacent and allow the firm to merely coast on its achievements.  "What an auto company loses in the market today," Nordhoff explained in 1963, "it probably can't recover in the next fifty years."

Fifty years after Nordhoff's death, Volkswagen is a much smaller presence in the United States than it was in 1968.  But as it continues to offer more interesting product, with a commitment to both excellence and quirkiness, and also continues to perfect its new modular platform, it seems to be slowly coming to terms with Nordhoff's wisdom.  VW isn't going to sell the 800,000 cars in America this year like it once hoped to - not even if it counts sales from its other brands, like Audi and Bentley - but it's committed to finding a vision as it makes its way down the road to full recovery.  Even if today's VWs don't resemble the aircooled VWs of Nordhoff's day, they are beginning to reflect the identity and vision that Nordhoff knew was always essential to making a car special.

After all, it's not a car.  It's a Volkswagen.