A Bug’s Death

On a late-1970s road trip across New York state, my brother and I counted so many Volkswagen Beetles that we got tired of punching each other. We began simply counting them silently, with the notion that, at some point, we’d see who’d counted the most and declare a Punch Bug Champion. I’d counted more than a thousand by the time we got to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Later, bored in the hotel, we sat by a rain-smeared window a few stories above the beat-up industrial city, counting Beetles until the sun set. Downtown Bridgeport in 1977 was a veritable sea of Bugs.

It’s hard to convey to a younger person just how omnipresent these vehicles once were, how they just filled your field of vision if you looked around anywhere in urban America during that era. Go stream some gritty ’70s urban action movies—Bullitt or The French Connection or anything else shot on location—and you’ll see them parked in the background of every car chase. The streets of American cities were once carpeted in Bugs. From 1968 to 1973, more than a million were sold every year. In 1972, when it passed the 15 million mark, the Bug overtook the Ford Model T as the best-selling vehicle on the planet.