A Bigger Bug

Barely seven inches shorter than the swank Mercedes-Benz 250, the new car will still be a Volkswagen--and look like a bug. Later this year, when the VW Model 411 starts rolling off the assembly line, enthusiasts willing to pay about $2,000 can move into the bucket seat of this four-door big sister of the Beetle, rev up the rear-mounted 68-h.p. engine and zip along the Autobahn at speeds of up to 85 m.p.h.

Since the original bug appeared on the market in 1948, more than 5,000 improvements have been made, but the car that turned Volkswagenwerk into West Germany's largest enterprise (1967 sales: $2.3 billion) has remained essentially the same. It still accounts for 70% of production, two-thirds of which is sold outside Germany, with the U.S. absorbing over 30% of total output.

No plans are afoot to scrap the basic bug. "It will still be there when I am pensioned off," promised Volkswagen's new president, Dr. Kurt Lotz, 55, after he took office last month. But reliance on a single model haunted Lotz's predecessor, the late Heinz Nordhoff, who remembered how Henry Ford almost ran his company into the ground by continuing to make Tin Lizzies despite changing tastes.

Hence the new model, ordered three years ago by Nordhoff to recapture the 20% to 25% of German Opel and Ford owners who abandoned their Bee tles for more expensive, bigger cars. Only by offering a choice of several lines, Nordhoff believed, could Volkswagen hope to reach out for the affluent German customers who now snub the bug. Since early this year, VW's 4,000 engineers and technicians have been hard at work in the company's new $87 million research and development center. Even Italy's legendary body designer, Sergio Pininfarina, has been enlisted as a consultant.

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