Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Here’s to the next 70 years
IT’S Heritage month and when you’ve been around for 70 years and for most of that time been at the top of your game there’s bound to be a couple of milestones and a legacy to reflect on.
And when you’ve become part of a country’s DNA like Volkswagen South Africa has, there’s even more reason to celebrate.
Almost everyone has a story to tell about their experience with a VW. Whether it’s a Beetle, Mk1 Golf, Jetta, Fox, Citi Golf, (red veldskoen) Kombi, Polo or a GTI, there must be literally millions of stories to tell.
I learnt to drive in my mother’s 1500 1970s blue Beetle, my father letting me put my hand on the gear lever to get a feel for the four changes before he let me behind the steering wheel, allowing me to feel like a god when I’d managed to change to third without stalling.
At school a friend’s family only had VWs in the driveway: a round nose aircooled Kombi (later a T3), a Beetle and two Golf Mk1s for the older sisters. Granted they were German, but to this day the family still only drives “Vollas”.
My aunt had a Beetle SP 1600, the same motor I had in my Beach Buggy many years later, and at school I helped a friend convert his dad’s Beetle to a Baja Bug, grinding, moulding, putting on large exhausts and fat takkies.
Four of us drove up from Cape Town in the middle of winter on a weekend pass in a 1600 Beetle with broken heater levers and a few months later returned from the “Border” to Waterkloof Airforce Base (yes, the same one the Guptas commandeered) and sped to Sun City in a Fox (which
was initially the Jetta) to see Freddy Mercury perform his magic on stage.
Later as a student, friends raced around in Caddy bakkies and my girlfriend had an immaculate Mk1 Golf and her father a Variant.
And that’s just me. So why the trip down memory lane?
Well, Volkswagen South Africa have been making cars in South Africa for 70 years and that’s no mean feat.
To honour that legacy they dusted off a couple of classics out of their museum and invited media, friends and VW family to help celebrate at their plant in Kariega (Uitenhage).
The plant came about in 1946 after a franchise agreement was signed between the South African company Industrial and Commercial Holdings and the Studebaker Export Corporation. A 20.2 hectare site was purchased for R2 500 just outside Uitenhage and so came about South African Motor Assemblers and Distributors (Samad) that employed 320 people. The rest, as they say, is history.
They made various Studebaker and Austin vehicles and on August 31, 1951, the first Beetle rolled off the assembly line. Four years later Type 2 Kombis, panel vans and pickups were also being built and as part of the VW family the Audi Super 90.
In 1965 the Studebaker Corporation shut and November 1966 saw the name change from Samad to Volkswagen of South Africa Limited.
The next year VWSA concluded an agreement with Auto Union GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagenwerk AG, for the assembly and distribution of Audi vehicles from 1 January 1968.
Their history is littered with landmarks that can fill an encyclopedia, including the export of thousands of cars and a number of unique South African builds but a red letter day would be the production of the last Beetle in January 1979, which we were privileged to drive as part of the 21 529 464 (you read right, that’s 21 million) produced world wide.
Here’s to the next 70 years.