10 Fun Facts about Volkswagen, Part 1 (#1-5)
For Part 2 (#6-10) Click here
Here at WP Motors, were uniquely equipped to assess the popularity, value-for-money, and quality of different brands of car – our most popular second-hand cars to date are actually from the same manufacturer: Volkswagen! In celebration of the Volkswagen Polo and Volkswagen Vivo, our top sellers, we bring you:
1. Thanks, Adolf!
Despite masterminding genocide such as the world had never seen before, Hitler is responsible for one of the most beloved nostalgic icons known to the Western world the VW bug. Adolf Hitler commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to engineer a family car (Volkswagen) that would carry two adults and three children and travel at a maximum speed of 100km/h. This personal mode of transportation was to be marketed as affordable through what wed today call hire-purchase.
2. Ripe for retirement
The legendary VW bug (Volkswagen Beetle) was produced for 65years (from 1938 until 2003). Ironically thats the age at which most folks retire these days! During that period Volkswagen produced 21 529 464 beetles!
3. Baby got hatch!
The first Volkswagen hatchback, the Golf GTI, was an after-hours project, an evening and weekends thing as the engineers called it, and was developed without the approval of VW Management when originally pitched the concept, Management declared that there would be no market for the vehicle. As we know now, that wasnt the case!
4. The wheels on the bus go round and round!
After WW2 ended in 1944, the Wolfsburg factory that produced VW beetles decided to do something about the fact that it had no effective means of transporting groups of workers effectively. The first solution was a kind of flatbed truck called the Kubelwagen the cab was in the back and a flatbed where workers could hop on and off was in front of it. It was a man named Ben Pon who first came up with the idea to move the cab to the front and to cover the flatbed so as to provide shelter from the elements and so the now-world-famous VW camper was conceptualized!
5. Whats in a name?
Did you know that, while maintaining their own design aesthetic and marketing their vehicles to different consumer classes, Audi, Seat, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Ducati are all Volkswagen Group Subsidiaries.
*Trivia originally compiled on Hubpages by user WerewolfCustoms1.
