mmarshall

More than that, SICK. For a number of years, street-spec Porsches were essentially complete redone VW Beetles, just with lower, flatter bodies and interiors. One of the first exceptions was the famous Porsche Speedster, the car actor James Dean was killed in in 1954 when he ran it into a Ford sedan on the way out to the track.....and even that was essentially a VW with a bigger engine.
The early Porsches were also dangerous in other ways....they could really bite you in handling, even if you didn't crash them into another car head-on like Dean did. Their air-cooled rear engines, rear-weight bias, swing-axle suspension (also made famous on the rear-engine Corvair), and too-light front ends made for a squirrelly handling.....Porsche was the car that made drop-throttle oversteer famous, leading to spinouts, sideswipes, and even rollovers from the tendency of the swing-axles to tuck the rear tires under and toss the car over onto its back. If I had a dollar for every one of those cars that ended up in the ditch or on its back I would be eating lunch with Donald Trump.

Good job with the listing.

The Bentley-Rolls Royce relationship with VW and BMW was a complete mess for awhile. I didn't understand it all myself. VW and BMW traded ownership and parts of ownership, production rights, and delayed production rights back and forth for several years.......like I said, it was a complete mess. That's why these cars had varying engines and drivetrains back and forth from different manufacturers.

LexFather

^^^^
I actually would like to have a 356 one day...

Big Andy

Rolls Royce Cars was floated off as seperate entity in 1971 when the engineering business was taken into State ownership. The engineering business licensed the car business to continue using the Rolls Royce name.

When VW bought Rolls Royce Motor Cars based in Crewe they only bought the rights to the Bentley name and the factory itself c/w workforce. Whether or not VW knew they had bought the company but not the rights to name I don't know.

In a seperate deal RR licensed use of the Rolls Royce name to BMW, who then built a brand new, state of the art, factory to build the new cars in Goodwood, south of London.

VW has come a long way since a British army officer set the factory back up again after the second World War. He offered the Beetle to British manufacturers who turned their nose up at its design and said it would never sell!

mmarshall

Thanks, Big Andy. The actual deals were a lot more complex than that, but you've done a good job of simplifying it in layman's terms.

Yes, the car was originally Hitler's idea. He was impressed with Henry Ford's assembly-line techniques and Ford's success in providing a cheap, simple car, the Model T, for the American masses. He wanted the same thing for the German masses.......a cheap, simple, reliable car, and he ordered Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to work on the project (remember, as dictator, after 1933, Hitler didn't have to ASK anybody to do anything).

Even with the Depression, it certainly would have sold much better in Germany in the 1930's had Hitler not shifted priorities to military production for the inevitable war he was planning.......the VW factories ended up building vehicles for the German Army instead. The Beetle didn't really take off in Germany...and, in the 1950's, in the U.S. until well after the war.

And, to directly address your point, yes, it is my opinion that the car would have sold well in Britain, had it been given a better chance. Though it had well-known handling quirks with the rear-weight bias and swing-axle suspension (as did the later Chevy Corvair which copied it), and the heater/defroster with the air-cooled engine was a joke, it was far more reliable than the British vehicles of the time with their Leak-O-Matic gaskets and failure-prone Lucas electronics.

Gojirra99

Nice diagram Mike, thanks for posting

juniorEXE

haha so thats why Clarkson always calls the 911 a suped up bug

mmarshall

No. By the time the 911 came along, in 1964, Porsches were no longer VW's. They were REAL sports cars.

Johnny

Like the Royal Families, with all this in-breeding, you get the occasional dud; and VW has sprouted its share...