By Jason Torchinsky

I've written before about Paul Schilperood's remarkable book that makes the case that the VW Beetle was largely developed based on the ideas of the Jewish auto journalist Josef Ganz and not Ferdinand Porsche, as has been commonly thought. Today, I want to look in detail at a key component of this idea: The Standard Superior.


The Volkswagen Beetle genesis story is easily one of the most well-known and often-told in all of…Read more


For some reason, tracing the earliest origins of the Volkswagen Beetle has proven a continual source of fascination. As a kid, I remember reading so many retellings of the same basic story in every book about the Beetle I could get my little, simian hands on.

These stories all had the same basic cast and plot: Hitler wanted a "people's car" for (mostly) propaganda reasons, and Ferdinand Porsche happened to share the dream of an everyman's cheap, useful car. Porsche had been developing prototypes since the early 30s through companies like NSU and Zündapp before finally joining forces with the Nazis, who bankrolled the final development of the car.
Only military variants were built during the war, and once in British control after the war, actual civilian VW Beetle production began in earnest. That's the basic story, pared down to the essentials, that I read over and over again. The Josef Ganz connection dramatically changes this narrative, demonstrating that the fundamental Beetle design came from Ganz' work and ideas, which were published extensively in the magazine he edited, Motor Kritik, and, importantly, in the cars that were developed using his ideas.

I'm not going to retell the book here — it's too involved and too good, and I recommend it heartily to anyone. But what I would love to do is give us all a good look at the first production car really built to Ganz' fundamental principles. This car is also where I would personally put the start of the Beetle line, even if the company and name differ. The car is so closely related — conceptually, technically, visually — to the Beetle, that I think if any car has a claim on being the Mother/Father of the Beetle, this is it.


The car is the Standard Superior, and it was even briefly called a "volkswagen" in advertising, before the Nazis decided that only their KdF company would be allowed to use that word. But a volkswagen it was, no matter what those ark-peeking-face-melters had to say about it: the Superior was absolutely a people's car.
Introduced in 1933, the Superior was based on Ganz' prototypes made for the Ardie motorcycle company (1930) and the Adler automobile company (1931) where he finalized his fundamental design concepts: tubular backbone chassis, mid-rear mounted engines, and independent suspension with swing axles at the rear. Standard hired Ganz to design their new cheap people's car based on the strength of those prototypes and his published writings. Ganz' design for the Standard Superior included all of these traits, along with a somewhat streamlined body design.