By 2003 Beetle annual production had fallen to 30,000 from a peak of 1.3 million in 1971. On July 30, 2003, the final original VW Beetle (No. 21,529,464) was produced at Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, some 65 years since its public launch in Nazi Germany, and an unprecedented 58-year production run since 1945. VW announced this step in June, citing decreasing demand. The last car was immediately shipped off to the company's museum in Wolfsburg, Germany. In true Mexican fashion, a mariachi band serenaded the last car.
1994 The Concept 1
While VW Germany was reluctant to resurrect the Beetle, the Americans were all for it and designed the concept one as a show car for the 1994 Detroit Motorshow. If you think it was pretty much like the final New Beetle you would be wrong. The concept 1 had all the curve's of the final production car but was based on the Polo platform and was therefore a much smaller car.
Response was so overwhelming that production was assured, and the decision was made to base the production model on the Golf platform, the New Beetle was a concept that well and truly made it.
The Volkswagen company owes its postwar existence largely to British army officer Major Ivan Hirst (19162000). After the war, Hirst was ordered to take control of the heavily bombed factory, which the Americans had captured. His first task was to remove the unexploded bomb which had fallen through the roof and lodged itself between some pieces of irreplaceable production equipment; if the bomb had exploded, the Beetle's fate would have been sealed. Hirst persuaded the British military to order 20,000 of the cars, and by 1946 the factory was producing 1,000 cars a month. The car and its town changed their Nazi-era names to Volkswagen (people's car) and Wolfsburg, respectively. The first 1,785 Beetles were made in a factory near Wolfsburg, Germany in 1945.
