I saw a news item the other day linking to a German language article about independent coachbuilder Wilhelm Karmann GmbH which related a bit of shocking news: Der Cabrio-Spezialist meldet Insolvenz an! Karmann, which once built convertibles for Audi, Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, Renault and VW, fabricated convertible tops for those and many other manufacturers, assembled AMC Javelins for sale in Europe, and built its own line of “Mobil” motorhomes, has filed the German equivalent of a bankruptcy petition and is going out of business.
That seems to make this an appropriate time to spend a bit of Car Lust bandwidth on Karmann’s best-known product: the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia–or, as one writer rather cleverly described it, the “Beetle in a Cocktail Dress.” That description is appropriate because beneath the Karmann Ghia’s attractively curvaceous styling is the heart and soul (and floorpan, engine, transmission, suspension, and other miscellaneous mechanical parts) of a humble Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle.
The story behind the Karmann Ghia is a fascinating one, with a surprising (to me, anyway) connection to a member of our own Car Lust family.
History contains many examples of auto manufacturers who stubbornly stuck with an established design in defiance of fashion (e.g., Checker’s Marathon taxicab, Ford’s Model T, AMC’s Hornet/Concord, Morgan’s entire product line). Perhaps the most stubborn of all was Heinz Heinrich Nordhoff, the first chief executive of Volkswagen, and a man who pretty much fit the archetype of the autocratic, perfectionist, ultracompetent German engineer.
Herr Nordhoff set a very conservative policy for Volkswagen. It built the Type 1 (not officially called the “Beetle” until the 1970s) and the Type 2 Transporter (better known in the U.S. as the “Microbus”), which was derived from the Type 1 and used many of the same mechanical parts–and that was it! The two designs were given periodic improvements and refinements, but there were no annual restylings and only a select few variations.
In the period when Europe was just getting started with its postwar rebuilding, Herr Nordhof’s conservatism made sense: there wasn’t much of a market for anything beyond basic transportation, VW already had a very good design that met that need, and it didn’t really have the money to do a lot of new product development even if the boss had been so inclined. VW would later get into trouble for being too slow to change, but all that was a couple of decades away.
Which is not to say that Herr Nordhoff was totally uninterested in expanding the VW product line. He was okay with the idea of new VW products, just as long as VW wasn’t called upon to spend a lot of its own money to develop them. In 1949, Karmann built a prototype Type 1 convertible (”Cabriolet”) on speculation, which caught Herr Nordhoff’s fancy and went into production (subcontracted out to Karmann, of course) later that year.
In 1951, Karmann began pitching the idea of a racy coupe built on the Type 1 platform. VW was open to the concept, but none of Karmann’s initial styling studies were accepted.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Alps, Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Ghia SpA, like Karmann, was looking for work. The Italians had talented designers and craftsmen, but the market for custom carbodies for the European elite was not what it had been before the war. As a way of drumming up business, Ghia built a “spec” car, the XX-500, by placing a dapper custom body on a Plymouth chassis, and showed it to Chrysler. Chrysler had just hired a new Director of Styling by the name of Virgil Exner–the father of Car Lust contributor Virgil Exner Jr.–and Ghia soon had a decent line of business crafting prototypes and limited-production custom cars from Mr. Exner’s designs. Among these was a show car called the D’Elegance, a coupe with swoopy, curvaceous bodywork.
At this point, you might be thinking that there’s a certain family resemblance between the D’Elegance and the Karmann Ghia. You’d be right about that, and with good reason. Around the time that Ghia began working on the D’Elegance, it also began collaborating with Karmann on a new design for that fancy coupe Karmann had suggested to VW. While Ghia later tried to claim otherwise, it’s pretty darned obvious just from looking at the thing that they cribbed off the D’Elegance in cooking up the VW design.
Our own Virgil Exner Jr. confirms this:
“In 1955 I had turned 22 and was attending the Kunst und Bilden Akadamie in Wein (Vienna) Austria. When school was out in late May a buddy of mine and I made our way to Torino to visit Luigi Segre and Ghia. Paul Farago, my father’s and my great associate car builder, was there and he asked Luigi to roll out the first Karman Ghia production prototype, as ‘it was developed from the D’Elegance.’ Paul had an issue with Gigi as to whether the windshield header might be too low as to make the roof look too heavy. They both asked me. I said that I thought so too, and that I would raise it by an inch. ‘Done,’ said Luigi, and it was, just before production was announced.
“Ghia had sent the second Karmann Ghia to be imported to this country to Chrysler. The first had been sent to Max Hoffman in N.Y. I drove Chrysler’s a few times in early 1956 and loved it. My father bought it from Chrysler for me as a graduation present. After about 6 months I traded it in to the local Volkswagen dealer for a brand new 1957 standard Beetle plus $600 that I used to finish the full sized build of my Simca Special.“
Herr Nordhoff liked the design, but was rightly concerned about production costs. The compound curves of the front fenders meant that they could not be formed from a simple stamping, but would have to be built up from several pieces welded together by hand, as shown in the footage of Karmann’s production floor appearing in this Portugese-language commercial:
It took Karmann 21 months to complete the engineering necessary to turn Ghia’s Exner-influenced prototype into a car that could be built cheaply enough to be profitable at the desired price point. The first production models rolled out of the shop in August of 1955. The “cabriolet” (convertible) version appeared in late 1957.
The drivetrain was straight out of the mid-1950s Beetle–a 1200-cc, 36-horsepower flat-4 motor and a four-speed transmission–and the only suspension modification was the addition of a front sway bar. The fancy bodywork weighed about 150 pounds more than the Beetle’s, but the extra weight was partially offset by the Karmann Ghia’s smaller frontal area and better aerodynamics. The 0-60 time was a Beetlesque 30 seconds, but the top speed was slightly higher than the contemporary Bug, at 72 mph. Still, it wasn’t exactly the hottest car on the road, and VW never tried to pretend otherwise:
On the other hand, the Karmann Ghia had Virgil-Exner-with-an-Italian-accent styling and the Beetle’s German-engineered reliability going for it. It might not be able to quite keep up with the other sports cars, but it would keep running while those other little two-seaters were sidelined by their chronic mechanical gremlins–and look good doing it!
(There was also another Karmann Ghia, the Type 34, which was built on the Type 3 (”Fastback” and “Squareback“) platform. It was styled by Virgil Exner Jr., and had a much more straight-lined and somewhat Corvairish look. The Type 34 was in production from 1962 to 1969, and was not officially exported to the U.S., though a few made it here.)
Karmann built a total of 362,601 coupes and 80,881 convertibles before the production run ended in 1974. A fair number have survived. Rust is a problem–as with all Karmann-built vehicles from that era–but even with that, restoring or maintaining a Karmann Ghia is relatively easy as vintage cars go. The mechanical parts are pure Beetle, and NOS or reproduction components are available from a variety of sources. As with most interesting cars, there’s an active owner’s club and other Internet forums where Karmann Ghia owners are willing to share their knowledge.
Give me a drop-top in Paprika Red. It wouldn’t be the fastest car by any means, but for a (moderate) speed run through the gorge between the old mill and the goldfish pond on a summer’s day, you could do a lot worse.
Volkswagen Karmann Ghia » Car News Articles – That seems to make this an appropriate time to spend a bit of Car Lust bandwidth on Karmann’s best-known product: the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia–or, as one writer rather cleverly described it, the “Beetle in a Cocktail Dress. …
Car Lust: Volkswagen Karmann Ghia – I saw a news item the other day linking to a German language article about independent coachbuilder Wilhelm Karmann GmbH which related a bit of shocking news: Der Cabrio-Spezialist meldet Insolvenz an! Karmann, which once built …
1973 Karmann Ghia Coupe on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Seen at Classic VW Kelley Park Meeting 2009 in San Jose, California. The first and only one owner of this car was present and bought it back in 73 in Hawaii.
TheSamba.com :: VW Classifieds – 1974 Karmann Ghia – Classified ads, photos, shows, links, forums, and technical information for the Volkswagen automobile.
RANDOM SNAP>> KARMANN GHIA – Speedhunters – Speedhunters is a car culture blog site from the creators of the Need for Speed video game team. We’ve hooked up with our favorite automotive writers, photographers and drivers from across the globe to bring you a daily dose of car …
vw tc kharmann ghia on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – vw tc kharmann ghia. … vw tc kharmann ghia. vw tc kharmann ghia by rubens rodrigues. To take full advantage of Flickr, you should use a JavaScript-enabled browser and install the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. …
Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Type 34 Razor Edge for sale, classic cars … – Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Type 34 Razor Edge Old English White buy classic car for sale UK, £5395 (Car: 56195). Classic Cars For Sale, the number one UK site for buying and selling classic cars with free classifieds adverts.
VW tow truck and Kharmann Ghia – 2xtrouble posted a photo: VW tow truck and Kharmann Ghia. More of my toy cars.
Karmann Ghia after the rain on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Karmann Ghia Cove (Pool). 0. Tags. Click this icon to see all public photos and videos tagged with Karmann Karmann · Click this icon to see all public photos and videos tagged with Ghia Ghia · Click this icon to see all public photos …
2 Karmann Ghia’s for sale: $2009 Classifieds forum: Grassroots … – April 14, 2009 7:42 p.m. mtn Dork. http://chicago.craigslist.org/nwc/cto/1122713194.html. 2 VW Karmann Ghia’s, 3000 for the both of them. Convertible and Hardtop. Not mine. Blah Blah Blah …
The red coupe at the top of this article came from Flickr user Felipe Abreu. The photo of the D’Elegance came from Peter Madle’s Stutz cars website, which includes coverage of other rare cars designed by the Exners. The festive yellow Cabriolet came from Flickr user Lucky Luc 512, who shot it at the Feuerwehrfest Altenhundem in 2007. Flickr user Thomas Tepe took the photo of a Karmann Ghia caravan at a Karmann Ghia owners’ club meet in Germany in 2005.
–Cookie the Dog’s Owner
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Car News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Virtual Tour Downtown Winnipeg Hotel
Pre-Owned Chrysler Wpg Manitoba
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }