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Rare Mercury Cougar Blends Muscle with LuxuryVocho Culture: The Volkswagen Beetle in Mexico
The original Volkswagen Beetle was popular the world over, but nowhere did it become more ubiquitous than in Mexico, known there as the Vocho.
The Definitive Beetle?
The Volkswagen Beetle is an automotive Rorschach test, each of us interpreting its nature and meaning through our own lens. For some it is the epitome of spunky flower power fun, for others the Beetle’s simplicity makes it the perfect introduction to DIY wrenching. Originally envisioned as “the people’s car,” the Beetle’s basic design and unique charms captured people’s imaginations, spawned designs ranging from the VW Bus to the Mayers Manx dune buggy to the Porsche 911, and garnered generations of devoted fans the world over. And no other country has a more intimate or longstanding relationship to the Beetle than Mexico.
Known colloquially as the Vocho or more formally as the Volkswagen Type 1 Sedan, the Beetle became Mexico’s best-selling car and a ubiquitous sight in the nation’s capital of Mexico City as the bulk of the local taxi fleet there for decades. Below we will trace the history of the Vocho in Mexico and how this German immigrant became a Mexican automotive folk hero.
Beginnings
Designed back in 1938, the Volkswagen Beetle made its way to Mexico in 1954, then as an import. The Beetle was a quick success thanks largely to its affordability, reliability, and its mechanical simplicity. With clear demand, Volkswagen responded by starting production on a provisional basis in 1961 with the first Volkswagen plant established a year later in Xalostoc. The small plant could not meet the burgeoning demand, so in 1965 work began in Puebla for a new Volkswagen plant.
Full scale production of the Beetle began at the Puebla plant in 1967. Those first Beetles ran a 1200cc four-cylinder, with a larger 1500cc replacing it in 1968. Just as in the States, the Beetle was a popular choice in the late ‘60s. By the end of 1968, the car had already reached its first 100,000 units sold, and that number doubled by 1971. By 1975, the Beetle had sold half a million units in Mexico.
While the Beetle’s popularity was growing in Mexico, back across the Atlantic in Germany, the decade’s old design had already been eclipsed by the Beetle ostensible replacement, the Volkswagen Passat. German production of the original Beetle ceased after 1978. That same year, the Beetle’s built in Puebla started being exported to … drumroll …Europe (and would be through 1985). The Beetle hit one million units produced in Mexico in 1980.
Decreed the People’s Car
The Beetle was already a success in Mexico, when in 1989, the car was given a government subsidy, the “Decreto Del Auto Popular” or People’s Car Decree to encourage sales of a domestically built car over more expensive Detroit steel. This helped make the Beetle Mexico’s best-selling model through much of the 1990s, and the plant in Puebla produced the 21 millionth (world-wide) Beetle in 1992. Though other, more modern imports, like the Nissan Tsuru began to rival the Beetle in sales, taking the top spot as the country’s best-selling car in 1994, the Beetle remained wildly popular, stealing back its title in 1996.
Nowhere in Mexico was the Beetle a more common sight than in the nation’s capital of Mexico City. There, the sprawling, labyrinthine streets were swarmed by the city’s fleet of Vocho taxis. Like all things, this was not to last. The Beetle was finally, after nearly fifty years virtually unchanged in Mexico, starting to show its age. Fuel-inefficiency, emissions, and lacking modern levels of safety made the Beetle a less and less viable over time. In 2002, another decree, this from the then-D.F. governor and now President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that called for all Mexico City taxi to have four doors and be no more than eight years old (the Beetle was grandfathered in an extra two years). This meant by 2013, the longtime mainstay of Mexico City streets, the Vocho taxi, was no more.
The decree that doomed the Vocho as Mexico City’s taxi dovetailed with an already precipitous drop in sales of the aging Beetle. Production of the original Beetle at the Puebla plant ceased in 2003. The final production year included a farewell edition, the Sedán Última Edición, of which 2,999 were built. These included the last unit off the production line, number 21,529,464, which was sent to the Volkswagen Museum in Germany.
The Vocho Lives On
Even twenty years after the last Vocho rolled off the line, the Beetle is still common on Mexico’s roads. In some neighborhoods and municipalities Vochos continue to be used as taxis, despite regulations otherwise. For many in Mexico, the Beetle was a first car, a family car, the car they learned to drive in. Sentiments run deep for the Vocho and legions of dedicated fans in Mexico continue to work on and restore these cars. Thanks to their sheer numbers and uncomplicated design, the Beetle is perhaps the perfect car for a devoted fan base to keep on the road today and in the decades to come.
It is utterly amazing that the original Beetle design lasted so long in Mexico. And this was thanks in no small part to the original intention behind the Beetle, a simple, easy to use, easy to fix car for the masses. In many ways, the very German Volkswagen Beetle found its true homeland in Mexico and its purest identity as El Vocho.
