Mexico’s beloved VW Beetle is a bug that won’t go away
● With its putt-putt engine and cuddly contours, nothing spells nostalgia in Mexico more than the vocho, the VW Beetle that has finally come to the end of the road.
After an 81-year love affair, one of the world’s most enduring and endearing cars last week received the last rites at the German carmaker’s Puebla plant in central Mexico, the only place it was still being made. The #ByeByeBeetle ceremony included a farewell mass and stirring send-off by a mariachi band.
But like its insect namesake, the affordable car that for decades epitomised a country on the move will probably avoid extinction. “If we’re no longer going to see the vocho silhouette, we’re going to have to make sure that we fix up the ones that still exist, to preserve them, so the vocho never dies,” said aficionado Arturo Díaz.
Workers at the Volkswagen plant wore yellow Tshirts emblazoned with the words “Thank you Beetle” — a national eulogy for a cheap and cheerful car that by some estimates once accounted for a third of all car sales in Latin America’s second-biggest economy, where vochos were the official taxicab for three decades.
Though the classic bug — designed by Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s at the behest of Hitler as a “people’s car” for the masses — halted production in 2003, the sleeker, 21stcentury incarnation was still being made.
But VW said it was “passing the baton on to the next generation” — including electric cars. Instead of Beetles, the Puebla plant will produce the Tarek SUV from next year.
The new edition was seen by die-hard fans as a pale imitation of the original — safer but blander. “It’s a very different car to the one that put Mexico on wheels for so many years. It was the car of the people, no doubt about it. It was cheap to maintain and was cooled by air, not water, which made it much more dependable in extreme situations,” said Marcos Bureau, editor of the Vochomanía magazine.
The true vocho, which was first produced in 1938 but did not take off until after World War 2, was a legend. From 1972-2002 its sales overtook those of Henry Ford’s classic Model T and 21-million of the VW “Type 1” were sold, though it was superseded as the most successful car by the Golf, the car VW introduced as the Beetle’s heir. The world’s top-selling car is now the Toyota Corolla.
The Beetle quickly became a legend, immortalised on screen as Herbie in The Love Bug and a series of movies. Martín Fonseca, 48, who proudly bought his first Beetle with his own money aged 16, called them “warriors … they don’t let you down … they can get everywhere”.
He was one of the millions of vocho taxi drivers in Mexico, where the original yellow Beetle cabs were replaced in the 1990s with “ecological” green-painted ones fitted with catalytic converters to run on unleaded fuel.
Since the cars were three-doored, drivers would remove the passenger seat to allow customers to clamber into the back — a solution that left them at the mercy of kidnappers and robbers who preyed on vocho passengers who had no way to escape.
“As a taxi driver, if a car saves you fuel, is sturdy and the parts are cheap, well, you don’t think twice. And not just taxi drivers. Families, businesses, office workers, everybody used them because they were cheap,” said Fonseca.
When the parents break up in Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning movie Roma about Mexico City in the 1970s, the father drives away from the family home in a vocho.
Bureau recalls sticking a sock on the carburettor of his Beetle to staunch a petrol leak, managing to limp across half of Mexico City in first and second gear after the clutch cable broke, replacing a fan belt with a pair of his wife’s tights and keeping moving in a big storm when other cars were stranded.
The cars chugged on, despite what some Beetle users recall was an unfortunate tendency for the back seat to catch fire because the car’s engine was at the rear.
“It’s things like that that make you fall in love, it’s nostalgia. I’m 52 and my love for the vocho began 25 years ago. Now I’m seeing how those of us who started meeting up 25 years ago are now passing on this love to our children,” said Bureau.
Germany may have been the Beetle’s birthplace, and Mexico its adopted home, but Beetlemania was a worldwide craze.
“The only car I have ever loved and always will,” tweeted Aakanksha Rustagi, a jewellery designer in New Delhi.
Uruguay’s famously frugal former president, Pepe Mujica, was once offered $1m by an Arab sheikh for his 1987 Beetle. In Brazil, where Beetles were once made, the beloved bug has its own national day.
Old beetles still putter along in parts of Mexico City and other towns, especially hilly areas where they perform better than more modern counterparts.
Bureau said aficionados from Japan, China and the US flocked to Mexico to snap up vochos, take them home and restore them.
As one self-styled enthusiast in Florida, Al Stewart, put it on his Twitter feed: “As long as there’s passion; as long as they are owners … the #Beetle will forever live. This isn’t #byebyebeetle but rather #ForeverBeetle.”
Families, businesses, workers, everybody used them because they were cheap