Watch Volkswagen’s Super Bowl ad telling its 75 years of American history

When Volkswagen entered the U.S. 75 years ago with its Beetle, it was an odd sight for most Americans, who were puzzled by its bug shape and peculiar design. The engine is in the back? But the oddity would soon become an icon, securing a prominent place in pop culture thanks in part to associations with everything from Hippies to a Disney movie.

VW’s peculiar American journey is the subject of its first Super Bowl ad in 10 years, which attempts to leverage the brand’s historical significance to spark sales momentum for its growing lineup of modern electric vehicles, including the new ID Buzz, which makes an appearance at the end of the spot.

But the ad from Johannes Leonardo and directed by Lance Accord (whose credits include VW’s classic 2011 Super Bowl spot “The Force,”) mostly lives in the past. Most of the more than 25 VWs featured in the spot are from model years earlier than 2007, including the 1960s-era VW Microbus, also known as a Hippie van, as well as a 1983 Rabbit convertible, 1984 Jetta and 1985 Cabriolet. 

VW released a two-minute extended version of the ad today. It will run as a 60-second spot in the game’s third quarter.

The ad, called “An American Love Story,” begins by re-enacting the German-born Beetle’s U.S. entry on Jan. 17, 1949, when it was imported by Dutch businessman Ben Pon and was then known as the Type 1. At first, it struggled to gain sales traction in the then-U.S.“bigger is better” car culture; that language appears in the ad in the recreation of a billboard for a competing automobile. 

The spot goes on to depict how VW found a place in American culture, with scenes referencing Woodstock; the 1968 Disney movie “The Love Bug,” in which the Beetle starred as Herbie, as well as customs like jamming as many people as possible in a Beetle or playing “Punch Buggy,” the VW car-spotting game that Bart Simpson once engaged in. (Volkswagen of America discontinued the Beetle in 2019, as more U.S. buyers gravitated to crossovers and SUVs.) One scene depicts two women getting married, then kissing and pulling away in a white VW Tiguan, model year 2013, the same year the Supreme Court made two landmark rulings extending gay marriage rights.

The 2011 “Force” ad—which showed a boy dressed as Darth Vader using the force to remote-start a Passat—is referenced in a scene depicting boys getting out of an electric VW ID4 as they head to Comic-Con dressed in Vader costumes. The line “We shape its metal. You shape its soul,” appears near the end of the ad before the ID Buzz is shown exiting a cargo container, in an attempt to bring the automaker’s journey full circle. (The new all-electric van is based on the Microbus.) 

When VW first came to the U.S., “it was a fish out of water,” but “it took Americans to adopt and embrace it and make the brand and the car than it is today,” said Jonathan Santana, executive creative director at Johannes Leonardo.

VW has “been part of American lives for the last seven decades in a way that I think not many other brands, especially automotive, can match,” Santana said. The ad is about “rekindling that love that America had for the brand, and inviting a new generation, especially in an era of electric mobility, to take on the brand and hop in for the next 75 years.”

While VW's U.S. market share is much smaller than it is in Europe, when you tell someone in the U.S. that you work for Volkswagen, "there is a twinkle in their eye when they reflect on someone they knew, or they personally had that car," said North America Chief Sales & Marketing Officer Andrew Savvas, adding that the brand wants to bring back "that spark in the eye, that love affair that Americans had with the brand."

The ad’s soundtrack is Neil Diamond’s “I am… I Said.” The song, released in 1971, is “quite a personal song” from Diamond, who was “at a crossroads of discovering who he is and who he wanted to become, which was a nice parallel story [for the] Beetle and its arrival,” Santana said.

The choice of a Diamond song works on another symbolic level for a brand celebrating its 75th anniversary, he added, because “that is a diamond anniversary.”