The Volkswagen Bug is one of the most familiar cars ever designed. More than 20 million have been produced, making it the most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made. The model managed to overcome its roots as an artifact of Nazi Germany (first year of production: 1938) to become a scruffy, sporty symbol of the Boomer generation.

The Beetle (as it was also called) lasted until the early 2000s—the New Beetle lasted from 1997 to 2011. In a sense, Volkswagen was to 1970 as Apple is to, say, 2010…. a very big corporation that was mass-producing machinery that, largely through the miracle of design and advertising, was admired and even loved by enormous numbers of people. It’s one of the few car models that has a bunch of books dedicated to it, such as Edwin Baaske’s Volkswagen Beetle: Portrait of a Legend.

The Beetle was so well-loved and popular with students in the 1970s that special business opportunities arose around it that were not true of any other car. In our own era, marked by stagnant wages, the prospect of earning money by using your car as a billboard has come to seem a sign of the times, but the idea is not new. There was a company dedicated to that exact thing in the 1970s. The only car you could do it with was the Volkswagen Bug, and the company was called Beetleboard.
 

Charlie Bird with two of his Beetleboards
 
Beetleboard was the brainchild of a youthful marketing executive named Charlie Bird, who was not, in fact, Charlie Parker and also not Charlie Byrd. The company existed from 1971 to 1984 and was far from a flash in the pan. Bird himself is still around and actually has a Facebook page up about the Beetleboards; apparently he intends to release a book about the phenomenon soon.

The primary target audience for the Beetleboards was college students. Anyone willing to turn his or her VW jalopy into a platform for hawking Dr. Pepper or KOOL cigarettes or Dom Emilio Tequila would receive about $50 a month with the additional possibility of participating in promotional events. As a choice bit of R.J. Reynolds ad copy stated at the time, “Most importantly, KOOL Beetleboard drivers enjoy the constant excitement of becoming the instant center of attention whenever and wherever they drive their KOOL Beetleboard!”

Aside from Bird’s Facebook presence, there’s very little about the Beetleboards online. One of the main resources is a website called Kevmania, which ran a post about it in 2010. The comments section of that post brought a few former Beetleboard drivers and employees out of the woodwork. Such as this:
 

I represented Beetleboards of America in Hawaii back in the mid-70s. Recruited, got cars painted, put on the decals, and promoted the advertisers in Waikiki parades, gatherings, special events, etc. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was fun. We had Jack-in-the-Box cars, Kool cigs, El Charro Tequila, and Bank of Hawaii. It was great to see the cars on the highways and byways of Oahu and be a part of something special. The guy sitting on the bug is Charlie Bird, president and founder of the company–one of the most creative advertising men I’ve ever come across. I do have a bunch of pictures. Even one of a Time Magazine bug, Levi’s Jeans and a whole bunch of others.

 
An article from The Palm Beach Post dated December 1976 states that Bird was in his mid-twenties when he came up with the idea in 1971 while touring colleges giving lectures. In the article Bird is quoted saying, “It’s the greatest ice breaker with the kids because it’s kind of wacko.”
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Voices of East Anglia
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Van Halen wanted to crush a Volkswagen Beetle with a tank in 1979… just to piss off Aerosmith