VOLKSWAGEN - BEETLE 1303 MOONEYES 1974

Product description

Quality metal model of the Volkswagen beetle 1303 car with a detailed design with a mooneyes print from 1974. The model has opening doors, rotating wheels and is on a plinth in a box.

The Volkswagen Beetle—officially the Volkswagen Type 1—is an economy car produced and sold by the German company Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 to 2003. It has a rear-engine design with a two-door body and is designed to seat five people (later Beetles were restricted in some countries for four people).

The need for a people's car (Volkswagen in German), its concept and functional goals were formulated by the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, who wanted a cheap, simple car to be mass-produced for his country's new road network (Reichsautobahn). Members of the National Socialist Party with an additional bonus were promised first production, but the Spanish Civil War shifted most production resources to military vehicles in support of the Nationalists under Francisco Franco.

Chief engineer Ferdinand Porsche and his team insisted on completing the design until 1938. Bél Barényi is credited with the original basic design of this car in 1925, mainly by Mercedes-Benz, on their website, including his original technical drawing, five years earlier, as Porsche claimed to have made the first version of it. The influence on Porsche design of other contemporary cars such as the Tatra V570 and the work of Josef Ganz remains a matter of dispute. The result was the first Volkswagen and one of the first rear-engine cars since the Brass era. With 21,529,464 units produced, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-produced car on a single platform ever produced.

Although designed in the 1930s, civilian Beetles did not begin to be produced in significant numbers until the late 1940s as a result of World War II. The car was then internally designated as the Volkswagen Type 1 and sold simply as a Volkswagen. Later models were designated Volkswagen 1200, 1300, 1500, 1302 or 1303, the first three denoting engine displacement, the last two derived from the model number.

The vehicle became widely known in its home country as the Käfer (German for "beetle", cognate with the English chafer) and was later sold under this name in Germany[18] and other countries as Volkswagen. For example, in France it was known as Coccinelle (French for ladybug).