What if the VW Beetle had never existed? | Hacker News Reader

What if the VW Beetle had never existed?

bbc.com

38 pointstomcam23 comments

This is a bit of an understatement:

"The Nazi leader’s interest in the vehicle was such that he even contributed his own sketch of what he felt the vehicle should look like, although it only has a passing resemblance to the final designs."

I think they should go back to Hitler's original sketch and look again. In my opinion, Hitler came up with the fundamental look of the Beetle. This goes beyond "only a passing resemblance" to what we know as the Beetle today.

Reference: http://www.brandpowder.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/small-...

Hitler was influenced by Tatra, a Czech automobile company. If you look at that sketch, it is solidly Tatra. Porsche himself was deeply influenced by that company. Many of the basic ideas of the Beetle had been done before by Tatra, including the rear engine layout.

The bones of the first Porsches have as much Czech in them as Austrian.

None of this is speculation, but history.

What happened to Tatra, and in general the Czech industry, since 1938, is a real tragedy.

Tatra was fine during the war. It's decline started with the ascent of communism and it's planned economy.

I can't find a reference, but I once read that by annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938, Germany increased its industrial potential by 50%. Just in time for the war...

Czechoslovak

There is a general and unspoken resistance amongst casual historians in assigning any merit to any of Adolf Hitler's ideas or concepts.
It's as if he has to be kept firmly bounded in the 'Crazy Genocidal Idiot' box in case any grudging recognition of merit would immediately flip him into public acceptance. But I don't think it's a healthy approach - it's not how history works.
Oddly Josef Stalin doesn't seem to get boxed-in like that.

I don't know how commonly known that is, but Hitler was a bohemian and failed artist before World War 1. While his paintings were quite bland and uninspired, he could draw and paint. There are occasional jokes that art academies shouldn't be too strict in who they accept - if the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna had accepted him, it would have saved the world a lot of trouble...

There's an Israeli skit related to that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f66h1hk5yco

Oddly Josef Stalin doesn't seem to get boxed-in like that
Nor do Mao, Pol Pot, Castro... they appear on t-shirts...

So does Hitler in some parts of the world.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/xd5bdd/nazis-chic-is-asia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_imagery_in_Thailand
https://www.famouslogos.net/images/hitler-fried-chicken-logo...

Though in supreme disagreement, I could see the case for Mao or Castro on a shirt. But who the hell is going to put Pol Pot on a t-shirt and wear it?

In my opinion Hitler needs to be kept in that box on the basis on how he killed millions of people. That's how we should remember him and the German Nazis forever.
On the other hand Stalin should join him as he killed even more people - see Ukrainian Great Famine, Gulags, etc!

The thing is, he was only human. One of the important lessons of that time is that it does not need a special breed of fanatical homicidal maniacs for what happened, it just needs humans. We're not fundamentally different.

Wow, yeah. That is quite close. The front especially, but the entire shape of the car is similar as well.

Isn't it rumoured that Hitler stole the Beatle design from a Jewish engineer? By Paul Schilperoord in The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz.

Not outright. Porsche took inspiration from a few sources. Notably Tatra as I had already mentioned, but it's not a long shot to figure that Ganz's ideas made it into the mix in a fairly hearty fashion.
The Beetle itself is an original Porsche design. While it can be argued that Porsche's original ideas might not be all that original, his application of those concepts to cheap and durable mass production is perhaps his greatest strength.
Porsche also designed a few tanks for Germany. One was poorly received and never made it into series production, and another that went into very limited (less than 100) and was prone to malfunction and lack of suitability to the purpose.

it was a clone of Tatra
http://www.porscheprototype.com/adolf-hitlers-manager-ferdin...
Third Reich did the same to Czech tanks after invasion.

This is barely touched in the article but while it killed some competitors, were it not for the Beetle we may not have gotten the iconic Porsche 356, and thus none of the subsequent 911 lineage.

Yeah, this is a much-better comparison than the rather ham-fisted one with Apple squeezed in at the end of the article.

I'm rather appalled to note that an article published by the BBC contains two instances of the greengrocer's apostrophe. All that licence money, and none to spare to hire a sub-editor?

> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.

Not sure if the article has been updated but the only one I could find after a quick skim was: “Love Bug’s”
Thing is the writer was trying to show possession with that apostrophe but I the correct usage would be:
“Love Bug”'s
Not terribly attractive to read though; I would probably rephrase to avoid it.
Also I'd say I notice this more and more. My suspicion is that graduates from the more prestigious universities are avoiding journalism as a career.

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