Cal Look VW Keith SeumeThe story behind the most popular style ever to emerge from within the Volkswagen scene: the history, the people, the anecdotes, the events, the racing, the clubs, the cars and the legends. Seume delves deep into the folklore of the Cal Look Beetle, talks with the founders of this cult and describesall noteworthy cars. Sftbd., 8 1/2x 11 3/4, 127 pgs., 125 b&w ill., 19 color.
This revised and expanded third edition updates the story across six generations of the VW Bus and includes additional information and pictures, including more conversions, as well new information about the very early years and the latest models. Using archive and period brochure images, and photographs of original-condition models still surviving to illustrate the detailed text, it documents the various specifications, layouts, fitments and optional equipment of over forty different conversion companies, from well-known names like Devon and Westfalia, to lesser-known or unusual models such as Slumberwagen and Arcomobil. Since publication of the first edition in 2005, followed by a revised, expanded edition in 2012, VW Camper - The Inside Story has been acclaimed by enthusiasts and lovers of the VW Camper, and has become a definitive guide to the many different camping conversions built on the VW Transporter and Microbus.
The California Look is the most popular style of Volkswagen customizing. The typical Cal Looker is stripped of chrome, lowered, has a high-quality paint job and hides a very hot engine. It all began in the late 1950s, when hot-rodders started tuning Beetles for the drag strip. Their successes gave birth to an automotive performance industry and their racecars' look soon spread street Beetles, becoming cooler, cleaner and more sophisticated. Keith Seume tells the story of how this phenomenon - completely unforeseen by the manufacturers of the humble VW - gathered pace in the 1960s, spread worldwide in the '70s, and now dominates the VW custom scene, with a look at past cars and race heroes, at the performance tuning industry, at the raceways, at the Cal Look of today, and at pointers to the Cal Look of tomorrow.
Patina Volkswagens is the first book to look at how and why Volkswagens with original paint and patina have become so popular. The book explores the many different facets of this trending hobby, from the cars themselves, to the owners and the global scene surrounding them.
At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.
Large size hardcover book covering everything about Volkswagen and their vehicles. 550 Complete History facts, 100 Herbie The Love Bug facts, The famous VW Advertising Campaign with 402 ads, Year to Year breakdown of the Beetle 1945 and the Bus 1949, 65 Fun facts of things done with VWs all over the world, VWs used in 40 movies.
IT WASN’T GERMAN ENGINEERING ONLY THAT MADE THE VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE AN ICON. IT WAS A MANHATTAN ADVERTISING AGENCY, TOO. Created in 1959 by Doyle Dane Bernbach and continued through the '60s and early '70s, the campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle is considered the best of all time. More than just promoting a car, it promoted a new kind of advertising: simple, charming, intelligent and, most of all, honest. In "Ugly Is Only Skin-Deep," Dominik Imseng retraces the creation of Doyle Dane Bernbach, sneered at by the big players on Madison Avenue because of the "ethnic" background of its founders and employees, who were mostly Jewish. Readers will then learn how the agency won the Volkswagen account and how an unlikely creative team set the tone for the most admired campaign in advertising history. Finally, the book examines the evolution of the Volkswagen campaign and how it managed to convince more and more Americans that smaller was better. In fact, the Volkswagen campaign didn't only fundamentally change the ethos of advertising, it also helped trigger the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
A shocking expose of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. Updated with a New Afterword by the Author. When news of Volkswagen's clean diesel fraud first broke in September 2015, it sent shockwaves around the world. Overnight, the company long associated with quality, reliability and trust became a universal symbol of greed and deception. Consumers were outraged, investors panicked, the company embarrassed and facing bankruptcy. As lawsuits and criminal investigations piled up, by August 2016 VW had settled with American regulators and car-owners for $15 billion, with additional fines and claims still looming. In Faster, Higher, Farther, Jack Ewing rips the lid off the scandal. He describes VW's rise from "the people's car" during the Nazi era to one of Germany's most prestigious and important global brands, touted for being "green." He paints vivid portraits of Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piech and chief executive Martin Winterkorn, arguing that their unremitting ambition drove employees, working feverishly in pursuit of impossible sales targets, to illegal methods. With unprecedented access to key players and a ringside seat during the course of the legal proceedings, Faster, Higher, Farther reveals how the succeed-at-all-costs culture prevalent in modern boardrooms led to one of corporate history's farthest-reaching cases of fraud-with potentially devastating consequences. As the future of one of the world's biggest companies remains uncertain, this is the extraordinary story of Volkswagen's downfall.
Bestselling author of ¡Ask a Mexican! Gustavo Arellano returns with Orange County, a seamlessly woven history of California's Orange County with Gustavo's personal narrative of growing up within its neighborhoods. The story began in 1918, when Gustavo Arellano's great-grandfather and grandfather arrived in the United States, only to be met with flying potatoes. They ran, and hid, and then went to work in Orange County's citrus groves, where, eventually, thousands of fellow Mexican villagers joined them. Gustavo was born sixty years later, the son of a tomato canner who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and an illegal immigrant who snuck into this country in the trunk of a Chevy. Meanwhile, Orange County changed radically, from a bucolic paradise of orange groves to the land where good Republicans go to die, American Christianity blossoms, and way too many bad television shows are green-lit. Part personal narrative, part cultural history, Orange County is the outrageous and true story of the man behind the wildly popular and controversial column ¡Ask a Mexican! and the locale that spawned him. It is a tale of growing up in an immigrant enclave in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but also in a promised land, a place that has nourished America's soul and Gustavo's family, both in this country and back in Mexico, for a century. Nationally bestselling author, syndicated columnist, and the spiciest voice of the Mexican-American community, Gustavo Arellano delivers the hilarious and poignant follow-up to ¡Ask a Mexican!, his critically acclaimed debut. Orange County not only weaves Gustavo's family story with the history of Orange County and the modern Mexican-immigrant experience but also offers sharp, caliente insights into a wide range of political, cultural, and social issues.
An exclusive look at VW's reinvention of the automotive world's icon follows the New Beetle from drawing board to concept car to the media blitz that accompanied the final product.