alternatehistory.com

According to the Wikipedia article on the Volkswagen Beetle:

The Volkswagen company owes its postwar existence largely to British army officer Major Ivan Hirst (1916–2000). After the war, Hirst was ordered to take control of the heavily bombed factory, which the Americans had captured. His first task was to remove the unexploded bomb which had fallen through the roof and lodged itself between some pieces of irreplaceable production equipment; if the bomb had exploded, the Beetle's fate would have been sealed. Hirst persuaded the British military to order 20,000 of the cars, and by 1946 the factory was producing 1,000 cars a month.

So it sounds like things could easily have gone a different way, if the bomb had exploded in the first place or while being removed, or if Hirst had been less persuasive, and the VW Beetle would have become just another of the Nazi's odd ideas that failed with the end of their regime.

What effects on the world might have come about from the lack of the Beetle as a banchmark for small cars?
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