Say goodbye to the Beetle as Volkswagen closes the ‘cult’ car’s production at its plant in Puebla, Mexico nearly eight decades after it was built. The decision was taken last year by the company to make way for eco-friendly electric vehicles. A brainchild of Adolf Hitler’s “people’s car” project, it was first built in 1938 in Nazi Germany and designed by Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche.
Post WW II, it went on to become a symbol of Germany’s rising middle-class success. In the 1960s, Beetle became extremely popular in the US among the baby boomer but was discontinued in the late 70s. In 1997, Volkswagen introduced the New Beetle
which was heavily inspired by the original design. The last variant Beetle A5 came out in 2011-12
