End of the road for the Beetle: Final model of VW's iconic car rolls off the production line in Mexico this week
- The last of the famous 'People's Cars' comes out of the Puebla plant Wednesday
- The Beetle began life in 1938 as a symbol of in Nazi Germany's new prosperity
- But it became a symbol of post-war reconstruction and the 1960s hippy culture
- It was made in Mexico from 1955 and kept on after the new model was launched
Volkswagen is halting production of the last version of its Beetle model this week at its plant in Puebla, Mexico.
Wednesday will mark the end of the road for a vehicle that has symbolised many things over a history spanning the eight decades since 1938.
The car has been a part of Germany's darkest hours as a never-realised Nazi prestige project, and a symbol of Germany's postwar economic renaissance and rising middle-class prosperity.
Factory workers assemble a Volkswagen Beetle 'last edition' at the VW plant in Puebla, Mexico, in this 2003 file photo
VW Beetles are assembled in lines at the Volkswagen car works plant in 1954
It was also an example of globalisation, sold and recognised all over the world, and an emblem of the 1960s counterculture in the United States.
Above all, the car remains a landmark in design, as recognisable as the Coca-Cola bottle.
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The original design – a rounded silhouette with seating for four or five, nearly vertical windscreen and the air-cooled engine in the rear – can be traced back to Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche.
Porsche was hired to fulfil German dictator Adolf Hitler's project for a 'people's car' that would spread car ownership the way the Ford Model T had in the US.
Perhaps the world's most famous VW Beetle was Herbie, star of a series of Disney films including Herbie Rides Again (1974), pictured here
Adolf Hitler speaks at the opening ceremony of the Volkswagen car factory in Fallersleben, Lower Saxony, Germany, in 1938
Aspects of the car bore similarities to the Tatra T97, made in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and to sketches by Hungarian engineer Bela Barenyi published in 1934.
Mass production of what was called the KdF-Wagen, based on the acronym of the Nazi labour organisation under whose auspices it was to be sold, was cancelled due to the Second World War.
Instead, the massive new plant in what was then countryside east of Hanover turned out military vehicles, using forced labourers from all over Europe under miserable conditions.
Vintage Volkswagens at the annual gathering of the 'Beetle club' in Yakum, central Israel, in 2017
Workers drive their Beetle cars from the car park on their way home from the Volkswagen factory, seen in the background, in Wolfsburg, Germany, in 1966
Relaunched as a civilian carmaker under supervision of the British occupation authorities, the Volkswagen factory was transferred in 1949 to the Germany government and the state of Lower Saxony, which still owns part of the company.
By 1955, the one millionth Beetle – officially called the Type 1 – had rolled off the assembly line in what was now the town of Wolfsburg.
The United States became Volkswagen's most important single foreign market, peaking at 563,522 cars in 1968, or 40 per cent of production.
A new-generation, front-engined Volkswagen Beetle at the 2019 New York International Auto Show
The company organised a Beetle roulette, with 10 red and green beetles in the Volkswagen stadium in Wolfsburg, to celebrate the 500,000th Beetle produced after the Second World War
Unconventional, sometimes humorous advertising from agency Doyle Dane Bernbach urged car buyers to 'Think small.'
'Unlike in West Germany, where its low price, quality and durability stood for a new postwar normality, in the United States the Beetle's characteristics lent it a profoundly unconventional air in a car culture dominated by size and showmanship,' wrote Bernhard Rieger in his 2013 history The People's Car.
Production at Wolfsburg ended in 1978 as newer front-drive models such as the Golf took over.
Workers fit the windscreen to a new-generation VW Beetle at the Puebla plant in Mexico, where production of the original model will cease on Wednesday
A model poses next to a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle covered in tiles made of a blend of 18 karat gold and glass at the annual Luxury Show in Bucharest, Romania
Four female employees tend to a Volkswagen at a petrol station in Deidesheim, near Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1954
But the Beetle was not dead yet.
Production went on in Mexico from 1967 until 2003 – longer than the car had been made in Germany.
Nicknamed the 'vochito', the car made itself at home as a rugged, Mexican-made 'carro del pueblo.'
A Beetle, known as Fusca in Brazil, painted in the colours of the national flag on the eve of the Brazilian team's World Cup match on June 12 2002.
A Volkswagen Beetle is unloaded at Emden harbour, Germany, as the first shipment of 1,600 Beetles made in Mexico arrives in 1977
The New Beetle – a completely new retro version build on a modified Golf platform – resurrected some of the old Beetle's cute, unconventional aura in 1998 under chief executive Ferdinand Piech, Ferdinand Porsche's grandson.
In 2012, the Beetle's design was made a bit sleeker.
The last of 5,961 Final Edition versions is heading to a museum after ceremonies in Puebla on July 10 to mark the end of production.
Former president of Uruguay Jose Mujica and his wife and current vice-president Lucia Topolansky in their VW Beetle last month
Dick Darling portrays a "y2k lightning bug" as he rollerblades in front of a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle named "Y2K BUG" during the annual Greenwich Village Halloween parade in New York in 1999.
The Maggiolino Cabriolet, a VW Beetle completely made of wood, is shown off by Italian artist Livio De Marchi in Essen, Germany
Guests view the New York Museum of Modern Art's 1959 Volkswagen Beetle at a panel discussion titled Design to Move in June this year
Guards stand behind a vandalised VW Beetle in front of a shop on a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris, during the 1968 student riots and general strike that rocked the city
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