10 Interesting Facts about Volkswagen

One of these following facts about Volkswagen might be interesting for you to read. Volkswagen is a German automobile manufacturer which has its headquarter in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Volkswagen is the original and top-selling marque of the Volkswagen Group. It is also the biggest German automaker and the second largest automaker in the world. Volkswagen also has three cars in the top 10 list of best-selling cars of all time: Volkswagen Golf, Volkswagen Beetle and Volkswagen Passat. With these three cars, Volkswagen has the most cars of any automobile manufacturer in the list that are still being manufactured. To get to know more about it, here are some facts about Volkswagen you might like.

Facts about Volkswagen 1: Roots

Ironically, the idea for the Volkswagen, “People’s car”, came from Adolf Hitler. He chose Ferdinand Porsche to engineer a car that could carry 2 adults and 3 children, and that could do 100km/h (62mph). And the idea was, that people could buy it trough an affordable savings scheme. That’s how the base for the VW Beetle was born.

Facts about Volkswagen 2: Mass Production

The legendary beetle was produced from 1938 up to 2003. That’s astonishing 65 years. We all know how fast car manufacturers switch and/or update their models today. There were 21,529,464 built beetles, of which 15,444,858 in Germany, including 330,251 Cabriolets, and about 3,350,000 in Brazil.

Facts about Volkswagen 3: VW and Audi

You could be driving VW which is almost identical to an Audi. The Audi 8 and the VW Passat may look somewhat different, but the VW Passat was created in order to identically match the mechanical build and parts of the Audi 8.

Facts about Volkswagen 4: Renault 5 Gordini

A lot of people think that Golf GTI (Mk I) is the first hot hatch. Well, it’s not true. The first hot hatch was the Renault 5 Gordini. And, the even more exciting thing is, that, the ‘Sport Golf’, as the engineers called it, was an ‘evening and weekends’ project, developed in secret outside normal working hours, because Marketing and Management just didn’t see that there was a market for it.

Facts about Volkswagen 5: Beetle Street Racing

Move over American muscle, here comes the Beetle? It is true. The Beetles were affordable stable vehicles that with a little bit of tweaking were extremely competitive on the drag racing circuit. The bubble style vehicle may look cute and sweet, but it is ready to kick some dust up in your eye.

Facts about Volkswagen 6: VW Camper

After the War in 1944, the Wolfsburg factory where the VW Beetle’s were being made had no means of internal transport. So the people who worked in the experimental department came up with the idea of a flat bed truck utilizing parts from another vehicle – the kubelwagen. Ben Pon came up with the idea of moving the cab forward and covering the flatbed over. The first prototype for the now world famous VW camper was born.

Facts about Volkswagen 7: Moving Market

In 1991, Volkswagen launched the third-generation Golf, which was European Car of the Year for 1992. The Golf Mk3 and Jetta arrived in North America just before the start of 1994 model year, first appearing in southern California in the late spring of 1993. The sedan version of the Golf was badged Vento in Europe, but remained Jetta in the United States.

Facts about Volkswagen 8: Work-Life Balance

Volkswagen agreed in December 2011 to implement a rule passed by the company’s works council aimed at improving work-life balance by restricting company email functionality on the firm’s BlackBerry smartphones from 6:30 pm to 7:30 am. The change was a response to employees’ complaints about high stress levels at work and the expectation that employees would immediately answer after-hours email from home.

Facts about Volkswagen 9: Museum

Since 1985, Volkswagen AG has run the Volkswagen AutoMuseum in Wolfsburg, a museum dedicated specifically to the history of Volkswagen. In addition to visiting exhibits in person, owners of vintage Volkswagens anywhere in the world may order what the museum refers to as a “Birth Certificate” for a set fee of 50 Euro.

Facts about Volkswagen 10: Herbie

The white #53 is the most popular paint scheme for the VW Bug and came from the Herbie movies. The Herbie series depicted the Bug as a race car.

Hope you would fin those Volkswagen facts interesting and useful for you additional reading.