VW Beetle overtakes the Ford Model T
On this day · 17 February 1972
The 15-millionth Beetle rolled off the line in Wolfsburg, retiring a production record the Model T had held for nearly half a century.
On February 17, 1972, the 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle came off the assembly line in Wolfsburg, Germany, edging past a world car-production record held since the 1920s by Ford’s Model T. The Model T had built roughly 15 million units across a 19-year run that ended in 1927; the Beetle needed far longer but never stopped selling.
The milestone made the Beetle the best-selling car ever made, a title it would keep for 25 years before the Toyota Corolla overtook it.
Volkswagen handed one record-breaking Super Beetle to the Smithsonian — a near-new car with about 16 miles on the clock.
The “people’s car,” designed in the 1930s by Ferdinand Porsche, owed its later success to a postwar manufacturing boom in West Germany. Volkswagen donated the milestone car to the Smithsonian, and production rolled on for decades more; the last original Beetle was built in Puebla, Mexico, in 2003, by which point more than 21 million had been made worldwide.
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