Carl Hahn, VW CEO behind Beetle’s success in America, dies at 96

Hahn died in his sleep on Saturday at his residence in Wolfsburg, Germany, in line with a spokeswoman from his charitable basis. A ceremony is deliberate for Jan. 24. 

“Carl Hahn was an amazing visionary and an amazing persona,” Oliver Blume, present CEO of the German carmaker, mentioned in emailed assertion on Sunday. “Volkswagen AG and Wolfsburg owe Carl Hahn an amazing debt of gratitude and mourn together with his household.”

As head of New York-based Volkswagen of America Inc. from 1959 to 1964, Hahn took a hands-on method to promoting automobiles. He toured the US in a VW bus, utilizing his charisma and wonderful English to show People onto “the Volkswagen manner,” Andrea Hiott wrote in “Pondering Small: The Lengthy, Unusual Journey of the Volkswagen Beetle” (2012). He computerized Volkswagen’s workplaces and standardized service to extend effectivity.

Most vital, he introduced Volkswagen to Madison Avenue, selecting Doyle Dane Bernbach — which turned DDB Worldwide, a part of Omnicom Group Inc. — to design what Promoting Age journal referred to as the highest marketing campaign of the twentieth century. 

As conceived by artwork director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig, the plan included the unconventional print advertisements “Assume Small,” celebrating the compact dimension of the Beetle, and “Lemon,” specializing in high quality management.

At a time when US automakers have been operating “silly promoting” specializing in the ever-changing appears to be like of their automobiles, VW and DDB offered “our philosophy of a automotive that doesn’t change for the rationale of change, just for the good thing about the buyer,” Hahn mentioned in a 2011 discuss on the College of California-Berkeley’s Haas Faculty of Enterprise.

Hahn’s advertising and marketing expertise helped the Beetle turn out to be the best-selling single automotive mannequin in historical past, with greater than 21.5 million produced between 1945 and 2003. Although commissioned and envisioned by Adolf Hitler, the Beetle was embraced by America, the place it impressed artists, transported hippies and starred as Herbie within the Disney film franchise that started with “The Love Bug” (1968). 

Hahn returned to VW headquarters in Wolfsburg following his election to Volkswagen’s governing board in 1964 and led the gross sales division. He misplaced his seat in a shakeup that took impact in early 1973 and left VW to steer Continental Gummi-Werke, Germany’s largest rubber firm, a forerunner of Hanover, Germany-based Continental AG. 

In 1982, Volkswagen introduced Hahn again as chairman and CEO following the resignation of Toni Schmucker. Throughout Hahn’s tenure, Volkswagen turned the No. 1 carmaker in Europe, opened new vegetation in China and Jap Europe, acquired the Spanish automotive firm Seat SA, and launched new variations of its Golf mannequin, recognized within the US because the Rabbit.

Following the autumn of the Iron Curtain, Hahn put Volkswagen’s industrial would possibly behind German unification, constructing vegetation within the previously communist East, and entered a three way partnership with Czech carmaker Skoda Auto.

At his retirement on the finish of 1992, Hahn informed Automotive News that his largest remorse was dropping market share within the US, the place he had first made his mark.

World imaginative and prescient

“My goal was to make a worldwide community out of an organization that was a giant exporter and had many overseas subsidiaries,” he mentioned.

Carl Horst Hahn Jr was born on July 1, 1926, in Chemnitz, a part of the Saxony area of jap Germany, to Carl Hahn and the previous Maria Kusel. His father headed gross sales for Auto Union AG, the carmaker that may be a forerunner to what turned Audi AG.

Drafted as a youngster into the German army, Hahn ended World Warfare II in a US-run jail camp in Ingolstadt, he informed a German newspaper in 2011.

He fled communist East Germany for the West after the battle, incomes a doctorate in economics from the College of Bern in 1952. He skilled in Italy for Fiat and labored in Paris for the Group for European Financial Cooperation.

Quick rise

From Paris, he wrote to Heinz Nordhoff, Volkswagen’s postwar chief, providing his concept for exporting automobiles all through Europe. Nordhoff favored Hahn’s “mind-set,” if not his particular proposal, and employed him in 1954 as private assistant, Hiott wrote in “Pondering Small.” Hahn quickly was promoted to the export division, then landed the task to open the US market.

On the time, Hiott wrote, the US “was lastly starting to take a second have a look at the little automotive that it had rejected and ridiculed for thus lengthy” — the Beetle. “By the mid-Fifties, whereas most grownup People nonetheless recognized the automotive with Hitler and the battle, there was now a brand new technology that had come of driving age who had much less connection to the automotive’s turbulent historical past.”

“They’d no person assigned to America,” Hahn recalled in 2011. “I had by no means been to America. I realized, apparently very quick, to get to know and perceive America. And I liked it.”

With the US-born former Marisa Traina, whom he married in 1960 and who died in 2013, Hahn had 4 youngsters and 9 grandchildren. 

–With help from Chris Reiter.

Discover ways to navigate and strengthen belief in your online business with The Belief Issue, a weekly publication analyzing what leaders have to succeed. Sign up here.