Erin Baker: Reviving the car that spawned the Beetle

But this week is the first time I've seen it in action in a meaningful way for a car. The car in question is the 1933 Standard Superior Type I, or, as most know it, the fore-runner to the Volkswagen Beetle, give or take a little later tinkering by Porsche... 

Built by Josef Ganz, a Jewish engineer and editor of Motor-Kritik magazine, and presented to Adolf Hitler at the 1933 Berlin Motor Show, 250 were subsequently built between April and September that year. Surprise, surprise, when Hitler subsequently launched the VW Beetle to the German public five years later, no mention was made of the Jewish engineer who had built what was, in essence, the first meaningful prototype.

The current car is the only known surviving chassis. It survived as a running car in East Germany but the bodywork was mucked about with, and the chassis ended up with Trabant body panels. Now, two men are aiming to restore it to its original glory and present it to the Louwman Museum in The Hague next year: Paul Schilperoord, Dutch author of The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz, and Lorenz Schmid, a Swiss relative of Ganz.

The two men are working with restorers to recreate the original wooden bodywork of the car. The original specifications stated it should be low-slung, streamlined, with a backbone chassis, a rear-mounted engine, independent suspension with swing axles and a price not exceeding 1,000 Reichmarks.

A May Bug prototype appeared in 1931, and Porsche followed suit with its NSU Type 32 Volksauto, but when it appeared at the Berlin show in 1933, Ganz's car was the only rear-engine production car in Germany. Still, Hitler took Ferdinand Porsche on to develop the VW Beetle and it was goodbye to Ganz, who was first arrested by the Gestapo, trumped up charges of blackmailing the auto industry, then forced to flee Germany for Switzerland. The poor man was once more hounded by the Gestapo when the Second World War broke out, and the Swiss government then claimed his work as their own. He ended up working for Holden in Australia.

It's a sweet story, and the right sort for a crowd-funding initiative, therefore, to restore this Standard Superior and give Ganz his moment in the sun. Early backers of the project get a little thank you pack including an invite to the handover at the Louwman Museum and the chance to go for a ride in the finished car, a set of 1:43 scale models of the pre-VW cars, including the Mercedes-Benz 120 W17, NSU Type 32, standard Superior Type II and Tatra V570, and of course the biography of the man himself. 

The crowdfunding campaign kicked off yesterday on indiegogo.com. I don't know, something about this story appeals to me; it's not a glamorous car, or an important barn-find, or a lost Ferrari 250 GTO that already has collectors salivating: it's two blokes who've found a chassis that's got a heart warming story behind it and an important little slice of history locked into its metal joints.