Word: volkswagen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...typewriters with keyboards of secretaries' red-nailed fingers. He has since graduated to relatively clean flowerpots and realistic, 8-ft.-long clay models of his ranch house at 1303 Alice Street. Australian-born Margaret Dodd has created a rococo ceramic line of miniature cars, ranging from a Volkswagen microbus to a 1937 La Salle. David Gilhooly, 25, molds dyspeptic hippos, crocodiles and warthogs that possess much of the pudgy charm of their 6-ft. 5-in. 250-lb. creator...
...largest industry. With assembly plants from Africa to Australia, the bug was the new Model T, a ubiquitous symbol of the West German economic resurrection. Although Italy's Fiat last summer overtook VW as the world's fourth biggest automaker (behind the U.S. Big Three), Volkswagen's total sales last year reached $2.3 billion, even after the West German recession of early 1967 forced a temporary 25% cutback in domestic production. Soon, the 14 millionth beetle will roll off VW's assembly lines...
Only Passion. Volkswagen's massive contribution to the postwar economic recovery that West Germans refer to as the Wirtschaftswunder was almost exclusively the work of Heinz Nordhoff, a courtly engineer whose only passion, he once said, was "to build cars, sell cars and build cars." The son of a Hildesheim banker, Nordhoff served long enough in World War I to be shot in both knees. In 1925, he took an engineering degree from the Polytechnic Academy in Berlin and began his career by designing aircraft engines in Munich. Joining Opel, General Motors' subsidiary, in 1929, Nordhoff worked...
...Poor Thing." Nordhoff accomplished his miracle at Volkswagen mainly by his love and knowledge of his business and an endless capacity for work. On a seven-day week, with only a few hours off for sleep, he started with 7,000 workers, and, after weeks spent clearing the rubble, began turning out the prototype bug designed before the war by Ferdinand Porsche. The product, he knew, was "a poor thing, cheap, ugly and inefficient." Its engine would expire after 10,000 miles, its brakes and springing were atrocious...
...Although Volkswagen over the years modified virtually all of the bug's components and introduced new models such as a microbus and station wagon, Nordhoff held to his proven formula of keeping the basic VW's lines unchanged from year to year, thus improving resale value. Last spring, his own Wirtschaftswunder long since accomplished, Nordhoff announced that he would retire at the end of 1968, and in a typically efficient manner said he intended during his last months at VW "to put my house in order." He thereupon groomed Kurt Lotz, former chairman of a Mannheim electrotechnical firm...