HN 2: The British and their Works

3.2
Striving for quality
"Too ugly and too loud" was how Sir William Rootes summed up
the wartime version of the Volkswagen saloon in 1945, adding
his gloomy forecast that: "A car like this will be popular for two
or three years, if at all." 155
Rootes was wrong about its future development. In the fifties,
the dream of owning a Volkswagen set the car-mad Germans
alight. The Beetle supplanted the Borgward "sticking plaster
bomber" as the most popular car, became an export hit, and in
1972 broke the legendary record of the Ford Tin Lizzy with
15,007,043 models sold. Its later reputation sometimes made
people forget that the Volkswagen manufactured in the first
years of the occupation in many ways failed to match the
standards of British or French cars. Between the post-war
version and the Volkswagen of the "economic miracle" lay, if not
worlds, then at the very least a broad spectrum of lasting improvements.
Some of them in retrospect proved Rootes’ unflattering
assessment right.
The "Kundendienstbrief" (service bulletin) No. 13, issued in July
1946, gave information on the initial success of the attempts to
reduce engine noise. To this end the rear part of the roof
uprights had been filled with insulation, and the rear part of the
luggage space floor together with its rear wall and lid had been
lined with bonded felt, on which a boot lining had been fixed.
In the following year, the still high noise level was further
diminished with the application of "anti-boom compound". 156
Visually, annoyance was caused by the "multi-coloured engines"
installed up to the spring of 1947, with their dark-blue air filter,
green cover plate and black and grey hoses. Whereas this small
visual blemish was relatively easily fixed by unifying the colour
scheme, the vehicle finish itself presented an extremely knotty
problem. As the sales department reported in December 1946, a
number of the vehicles delivered in the previous month were
covered with a heavy layer of dust, leaving visible damage to the
outer skin of the paintwork which could only be remedied by a
respray. Most vehicles had bad incipient rusting on the door
hinges, the flanges on the front and rear lids, and the rain
channels. The American inspector rejected on average 20 to 25
per cent of the vehicles supplied because of substandard paintwork
and rust spots. The numerous complaints of the Military
Governments were swelled by the grumbles of many customers
that the Volkswagen was not supplied with a high-gloss finish.
The paintwork and rust damage were in part due to the lack of
suitable parking lots for the new vehicles. The parking areas
allocated to sales in the foundry building proved unsuitable
because the roofs were in some cases badly damaged, and
despite numerous reminders to the factory construction department
had not yet been properly weatherproofed. In rainy or
snowy weather the bodies were so badly damaged by lime
splashes that almost all vehicles delivered had to be touched up
or resprayed. The sales department therefore announced in
December 1946 that it would no longer accept these vehicles. 157
Whilst the premises improved, the problems with the vehicle
paint finish remained. In June 1947, 220 vehicles had to be
resprayed. Three months later the inspection department reported
that the green bodies stored for the American army
had become unsightly in a short space of time through "signs of