Mr. Volkswagen

I just learned today by chance, on what would have been his birthday, that former Volkswagen CEO Carl Hahn died back in January of this year (2023) at the age of 96.  Note to American television news: You suck!  Though to be fair, he died just a couple of days after Elvis Presley's daughter, so his obitaury was probably overshadowed considerably.

That out of the way, I am sad to hear this news.  Carl Hahn was hardly just another Volkswagen executive.  Apart from Heinz Nordhoff,  who got the fledgling company up and running after the Second World War, Hahn is the most important figure in VW's postwar history.  He is the only man to serve as both president of Volkswagen of America and as CEO of Volkswagen AG.  He started the Beetle on its upward sales trajectory in the U.S. and he later built Volkswagen into a global powerhouse.

When Hahn first arrived in the United States in 1959, the Beetle was selling in respectable but miniscule quantities.  Most advertising for the Beetle was local, varying from one metropolitan area to another, and Detroit dominated the U.S. automotive with its pushy, glitzy ad campaigns.  After deciding to hire an advertising agency to compete with the Big Three, whose own small cars were just beginning to come onto the market, Hahn soon found himself disgusted with the cookie-cutter advertising for the Volkswagen that each agency he went to offered.  Then he went to Doyle Dane Bernbach a small New York agency whose co-founder Bill Bernbach, a Jew, had numerous Jewish businesses such as Ohrbach's department store and Levy's rye bread as clients and was known for producing ads with subtle, cheeky Borscht Belt humor.  Doyle Dane Bernbach roved to be the right fit for Volkswagen, as its propose advertising, rather than try to hype the car with gimmickry and novelty value, would instead admit to its small size, its odd shape, and its noisy engine.  The plan was to turn these deficiencies into assets, explaining how the car was fuel-efficient, inexpensive to buy and maintain, and how its improvements were under the skin.  Volkswagen, Doyle Dane Bernbach planned to stress, would not focus on how the car was changed on the surface to look better but how it was changed underneath to last longer.  Yes, the car was small, underpowered and even ugly . . . but it got you where you wanted to go. 

Hahn found Doyle Dane Bernbach's approach refreshing and he found Bernbach and his partners to be men of integrity.  He went ahead and hired the agency, and it created the most memorable ad campaign in history. 

The ads  Doyle Dane Bernbach created would send Beetle sales skyrocketing in the U.S., and they became as much as part of the pop-culture landscape as the Beetle itself and the Microbus.  Doyle Dane Bernbach would get the ad account for Volkswagen globally, and it would ultimately do business for Volkswagen of America for 36 years.  It also diluted the stigma against Volkswagen; a Jewish ad agency, was selling Hitler's car.  The years that Hahn and his successor, Stuart Perkins, spent running Volkswagen of America were the most fruitful for the German automaker in the United States.  The house that Hahn built - the Volkswagen of America headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey - became the preeminent import-car business in America.  His faith in the Beetle earned him the affectionate nickname "Mr. Volkswagen" from American VW enthusiasts.

After a stint as CEO of Continental Tire in the seventies, Hahn returned to Volkswagen to become chairman in 1982, and his eleven years at the helm of Volkswagen AG saw the greatest expansion in the firm's postwar history.  Having inherited the new line of water-cooled, front-engine automobiles such as the Mark 1 Golf / Rabbit and the Scirocco, Hahn sought more markets for Volkswagen.  He invested in a small manufacturing plant in China, setting the stage for VW's phenomenal growth there, and would also set up Volkswagen dealer networks in the newly liberated Eastern European countries and as well as former Soviet republics such as the Baltic States.  Hahn's takeover of other automakers at this time was fueled by a vision  that was as romantic as it was opportunistic; he acquired Spain's SEAT and Czechoslovakia's Škoda, two companies that had once been the wards of totalitarian governments as Volkswagen had been, and modernized their lineups, freeing them from their authoritarian past as Volkswagen had been.  He also assumed control of the assets of VEB Sachsenring, the East German automaker that made Trabants, and converted the Zwickau factory into a modern plant, which now makes the electric ID.3 hatchback.  Hahn himself, in fact, had been born and raised nearby in Chemnitz and escaped to West Germany with his father, an executive at Auto Union (the forerunner of the modern Audi brand), and his mother when Auto Union relocated to Ingolstadt as Chemnitz fell into the Soviet zone of the occupation of Germany after World War II. 

One accomplishment Hahn failed to achieve as Volkswagen CEO, ironically, was the resuscitation of Volkswagen's U.S. division after it had languished in the face of stiff competition from the Japanese and Detroit.  After an making initial effort at improving sales in the United States and introducing the GTI to the country, Hahn more or less left Volkswagen of America to its own devices and concentrated on growing the business elsewhere.  By the time he retired in 1993, Volkswagen sales in the U.S. had sunk so low that it almost left the U.S. entirely.  Hahn, who had established Volkswagen in America, came extremely close to being remembered as the man who let the brand die in the U.S. market.  Only the strong actions by his successor as Volkswagen chairman, Ferdinand Piëch, prevented such an outcome.

Hahn's record is still admirable.  Under his time as Volkswagen AG chairman, the company not only expanded globally but produced exciting products such as the the Rallye Golf, the third-generation Passat, the third-generation Golf and Jetta, and the awesome Corrado sports coupe.  The incredible 16V engine and the G supercharger were also created in that time.  The cars became more advanced, more stylish, and increasingly fun to drive.  Hahn understood the meaning of Volkswagen - solid transportation at an affordable price with driving pleasure.  It showed in the way Americans embraced the Beetle in the sixties and American VW enthusiasts revered such cars as the Golf GTI and the Jetta GLI as well as the base Jetta in the eighties.  It's too bad that today's managers of Volkswagen of America - who would rather sell American-style SUVs than live up to VW's German heritage - don't get that.  RIP, Carl Hahn. 😢 

From Small Quantities to Thinking Small

This past January marked the seventieth anniversary of the first time Volkswagens were offered for sale in the United States, thanks to an enterprising Dutch car importer named Ben Pon (left, below).

Pon failed to interest any dealers stateside to take a Volkswagen franchise despite having been successful at selling Beetles in the Netherlands, the first country outside Germany where VWs were available.  In 1949, Volkswagen sold two Beetles in the United States.

In 1950, Volkswagen sold even more of them in the U.S. :-D

By 1959, Volkswagen had set up an official network of dealers, with its U.S. headquarters working out of a building in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan.  VW sales were respectable, with minimal advertising and word of mouth moving the metal, but Volkswagen of America's recently installed president, Carl Hahn, wanted to sell more cars, and so he decided to hire an advertising agency to launch a coordinated campaign.

And so it was sixty years ago that the most memorable car ad campaign in history was launched. :-)

While other car ads of the late 1950s presented incredibly glamorous illustrations and superlative copy to promote the product from Detroit's Big Three and the smaller domestic automakers still around then, Doyle Dane Bernbach, the small New York ad agency that Hahn employed, opted for a quieter, more subtle approach to selling cars.  Knowing that the Volkswagen Beetle was not glamorous, was not flashy, and - to most people - was not even pretty, the ad campaign it created preferred to be honest about the car.  It wasn't big or glamorous.  It was small and slow without many amenities.  But Doyle Dane Bernbach capitalized on the Beetle's strengths, particularly how its four-cylinder engine and its size made it economical to run and maintain.  Its beetle shape was streamlined and simple.  It was a car that made small a virtue in a country then (as now) obsessed with bigness.

The Doyle Bane Bernbach ads even acknowledged that the Volkswagen wasn't a perfect car, ironically underscoring Volkswagen's commitment to quality and reliability.  The "Lemon" ad reminded buyers that the factory in Wolfsburg was prone to making a defective car but that none of these lemons would ever make it to a VW showroom.  And the ads turned the VW's unchanging appearance - at a time when visible model-year changes from Detroit were commonplace - into a plus, saying that the changes VW made annually were under the skin and designed to make a VW run better and last longer, not look better or even look different.

Sure, GM or Ford might give their long, low-slung coupes a two-tone paint job.  But unless a Beetle owner was willing to do it himself on his car, you'd never see a two-tone Beetle anywhere.

Volkswagen made fun of itself in these ads for daring to offer such an ugly car.  But heck, VW was proud not to be what Ray Davies would call a "dedicated follower of fashion."  When it did make a beautiful car, as it did with the Type 3 Fastback, VW ads expressed mock concern about the car ruining the brand's image.

And yes, a Volkswagen was slow.  VW had no problem admitting that.

Because a slow car that gets you where you want to go is better than a fast car that breaks down a lot.

Volkswagen's ads were honest, simple and direct, communicating to the prospective car buyer of its features and how it provided reliable, economical transportation in a quiet, conversational manner.  The font, Franklin Gothic, was as low-key and as subtle as the copy, which was written with intelligence and wit by Doyle Dane Bernbach copywriters Julian Koenig and George Lois, who were always mindful to tell people what a Volkswagen was and show awareness of what it wasn't.

Volkswagen ads explained how the engine was cooled by air, highlighted the available traction from the rear-engine/rear-rive configuration, and explained the various improvements under the skin.  You knew what you were getting when you bought a Volkswagen.

Volkswagen mostly eschewed gimmicks like celebrity endorsements, though one memorable ad featuring basketball star Wilt Chamberlain showed him trying - and failing - to get inside a Beetle, the message being that while the Beetle was too small for Chamberlain, it was still big enough for most people. 

(Aside: Doyle Dane Bernbach retained a touch of that wit even in the watercooled age, when Volkswagen began to lose its way in the United States, when it brought back Chamberlain to show how he could fit in a Volkswagen Rabbit.)

Carl Hahn was pleased with his choice of Doyle Dane Bernbach for the Volkswagen campaign.  He found the ad men, including agency boss Bill Bernbach, to be people of integrity.  The Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign remains the gold standard for automobile advertising, both for the sales they generated and for their own refreshing honesty.  To show here even all of the best ads from the campaign would take too much bandwidth.

Today, Volkswagen doesn't want us to think small.  It's encouraging us to "drive bigger" - not drive a bigger car, like its SUVs, but a bigger idea . . . electric cars that return Volkswagen to the honesty and economy that the Beetle once offered, with a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and admission of VW's guilt for the TDI scandal and a sincere desire to move on and redeem itself.  It's all very noble.  But, as vehicles get bigger and become more pretentious and less about getting from one place to another, I look at the old Doyle Dane Bernbach ads for Volkswagen and realize how thinking small was and could still be a big idea.

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.