My 1973 1300 VW Beetle

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  The new age VW Beetle currently on sale has failed to capture the public imagination on anywhere near the same scale as the original. Photo Gallery

Beetle bug, love bug, punch buggy. Call it what you will, the Volkswagen Beetle is entrenched in Australian car folklore.

A whopping 260,000 were sold in Australia from 1953 to 1977 and most of them were assembled or completely made here. Herbie the Love Bug, the car star of several family fun movies of the 60s and 70s was probably the most famous but the car that began life in Nazi Germany has had a life of its own.

The new age VW Beetle currently on sale has failed to capture the public imagination on anywhere near the same scale. But that's probably a reflection of just how strong the affection for the original car has been.

One such fan is Sydney man Carl Moll who owns an original-condition 1973 1300 Beetle. Moll uses the car as a family driver and as his children have grown up that have begun to appreciate historic and rare values of the rear-engined machine.

"I've had always great interest in the car." he says. "I think its the history of them. They are becoming rarer by the day. "They are fairly unique, they are air-cooled," he says. "They are definitely a head turner. "When I park it and come back there's people looking at it. The kids say. `There's a punch-buggy."

Moll says the Beetles have proven great survivors due to their "robust, basic nature. There's still plenty of them out there. "You realise there was 21.5 million of the things built."

He bought the car in original condition from a mechanic back in 1998 and scored the car's original papers with it. Moll has had it maintained in original condition ever since. "It's absolutely stock original."

He says it has been refurbished, received fresh painting and interior work including the head-lining and repairing the seats but all the work has been done with the aim of keeping it original.

Moll says the 36-year-old car is still a pleasure to drive. "It's no problem to drive in traffic. It keeps up. The only thing it doesn't have is the braking system of the modern car. It doens't brake as quickly."

He says it has a top speed of about 100km/h. "It's not the sort of car you go around thrashing," he says. But Moll says the unique nature of the rear-engine Beetle is a feature of its drive. "You can feel a lot of classic points about it."

The club and the event celebrate an illustrious history for a brand that was built out of the German war effort. After the war the British took over VW production and the Beetle was soon being mass-produced around the world.

They were first assembled in Australia in 1954 at Clayton in Melbourne. Nissan and HSV have later built cars on the same site. Local content increased with the use of Australian metals, glass and components. By the early 60s VW was second only to Holden in car sales in Australia, outpacing Ford.

The company switched from full manufacture of the cars in Australia to assembling parts supplied from Germany in 1968. It all came to an end in 1976 as Japanese imports were proving too price competitive and more modern than the Beetle.

World-wide production of the Beetle continued up until just a few years ago in Mexico. Though componentry had moved on, the same basic body design from 50 years earlier was still in use and the legend lived on. The VW nationals will be held in Sydney this weekend.