Word: volkswagens
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...foreign invasion has indeed caught Detroit with its prices up. In the late 1950s, U.S. carmakers met the same challenge by introducing compacts, but prices and sizes for those models have risen sharply, resulting in the same old problem. Volkswagen, with its new "automatic stick shift" that offers the driver a choice of changing gears or not, now ranks No. 3 in sales behind the big Chevy and Ford models...
...poor in the fullest sense," Volkswagenwerk's Heinz Nordhoff once remarked, "has certain compensations. It strips the soul clean." When he reluctantly took charge of Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant in North Germany in 1948, Nordhoff and his company both had more than enough of such spiritual compensation...
Built by Hitler to turn out "people's cars," the Volkswagen factory made only 210 cars before it went into war production, and after V-E day it was a shambles, 60% destroyed by Allied bombs. Nordhoff, too, was part of the postwar wreckage-a lifelong German automan who, because he had manufactured trucks for the Wehrmacht, was forbidden to work in the U.S. zone at anything except manual labor...
Result was that while Volkswagen and General Motors' Opel weathered the recession and are now prospering again, Fords have become a drag on the German market. Said the journal Auto, Motor Und Sport of the 1968 Ford models: "Never has a new line of cars attracted so little attention." But Ford hopes to hit the comeback trail in the fall with the introduction of its small, inexpensive "Escort" model...
...four set out for Braverman's fu neral, bickering all the way to the Brooklyn synagogue. Sometimes the quarrels center around Booke's Volkswagen, an offense to Wiseman's anti-German sensibilities. Sometimes the men vie with each other in a heated trivia contest (who were the members of the Rinkydinks?). When the quartet collides with a Negro cab driver (Godfrey Cambridge), their debate rises to tidal proportions, only to unroil when the cabbie turns out to be a convert to Judaism. The mourners arrive late for the services and giggle derisively as a rabbi (Alan King...