Record Breaker

The most-produced car model ever ended production in its homeland 40 years ago. We consider where the other 10 million VW Beetles came from.

- Paul Wager

There’s much talk in the VW scene of exactly when the Beetle entered production, but the general consensus is that it was 80 years ago in 1938; the year Professor Porsche’s crude first prototypes were judged to have been sufficiently developed to enter production.

What’s often overlooked, especially by those outside the air-cooled VW scene, is that although the Volkswagen Type 1 (as the Beetle was more properly known) would go on to be the most-produced single model in history, a significant part of this would be produced not by the VW group’s Wolfsburg parent plant in Germany but by plants scattered around the globe – most notably in South America.

Indeed, the year 2018 also marks another significant anniversary for the Beetle, since on January 19, 1978, the final German-produced example rolled off the line in VW’s Emden plant. The end of Wolfsburg production had come sooner on February 17, 1972, when the 11,916,519th car had left the line.