1939 Volkswagen Beetle

The "Type 60" was the very first production-ready Beetle debuted at the 1939 Berlin Motor Show just a few months before German troops invaded Poland. On 15 August the first KdF-Wagen leaves the production line. At this time the name was changed to Type 60 VW Type 1. The factory had only produced a handful of cars by start of the war in 1939. The People's Car would be made available to citizens of the Third Reich through a savings scheme. Potential buyers were even given the option of participating in a savings plan, whereby they could save 5 Reichsmark a week until they had reached their goal – 990 Reichsmark, or the price of a Volkswagen. By the end of the war, aspiring car owners had paid about 300 million Reichsmarks into this savings plan. The problem, however, until the end of World War II, almost no vehicles were provided to the public. The first volume-produced versions of the car's chassis were military vehicles, the Kübelwagen Type 82 (approx. 52,000 built) and the amphibious Schwimmwagen Type 166 (approx. 14,000 built).

1939 Volkswagen Beetle

The car was designed to be as simple as possible mechanically, so that there was less to go wrong. As every subsequent air-cooled Beetle would be, the Type 60 rode on a chassis that was basically a stamped steel pan with the 1.0-liter (actually 985 cubic centimeters) overhead valve, flat-four engine located in the back making just 23.5 horsepower. Paired with that engine was a four-speed manual, non-synchromesh gearbox that sent power to the rear wheels that hung at the end of some rather treacherous swing axles. The front end used a trailing arm and torsion bar system that was rugged, if not particularly supple, and the steering was by a worm gear. The braking system consisted of four dinky, mechanically operated drums.