How this basic Beetle made it to The Amelia

As you walked the show field at The Amelia Concours d’Elegance last year, you saw the usual suspects. A Ferrari 250 GT. A Mercedes-Benz 300 SL. A Volkswagen Beetle. A Le Mans-winning Jaguar D-type. Wait, a Volkswagen Beetle? What’s that doing there?

It’s not one of a kind, nor a special edition. It’s a vehicle dubbed “the people’s car,” for crying out loud.

Sure, it’s an early Beetle in incredible shape, but how pedestrian. They made umptillion of these things. While other cars have their handlers on the show field, this Beetle’s owners, David Sanborn and Jennifer Huber, stand proudly next to their pride and joy.

“It’s just a matter of applying to be considered,” Jennifer says matter-of-factly of how their Beetle made it to The Amelia. “I guess ours stood out.”

What made it worthy to be in company of rare, unique cars at one of the world’s most prestigious concours? Its provenance. Specifically, the Beetle’s last owner, Florian Schneider, who co-founded and led the German electronic group Kraftwerk.

How They Became Fans

David became obsessed with Kraftwerk when he first heard them in his early teens.

“They sounded nothing like any other music out there,” David recalls. “Nobody was an all-electronic band when I was a kid.”

“David used to make mixtapes for me and introduced me to Kraftwerk,” Jennifer continues. “I loved their music. I loved their aesthetic–the color palette, the fonts, the graphics. Everything [about their look] is clear and distinct.”

When David and Jennifer married, yes, they had a Kraftwerk-themed wedding, complete with Kraftwerk-red shirts. They even made a video with Kraftwerk puppets driving on the Autobahn.

Kraftwerk fanatics? Absolutely. But they don’t consider themselves Kraftwerk memorabilia collectors.

The closest they come to that is owning a Hazeltine computer terminal, which was featured on the group’s 1981 album Computer World. David and Jennifer use theirs to display ASCII art related to Kraftwerk. They also have an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, which is like the one Kraftwerk used, but not the actual one they had.

“We’re not the sort of people who eschew bathing and other things in life because they’re so focused on it, like some Kraftwerk fans we know,” David reassures us. “We do love the band a lot. We do have a lot of ephemera, a lot of rare records … but as far as actual trinkets from the band, those are few and far between.”

When They Met Schneider

The connection with David and Jennifer to the Beetle begins with a relationship with another German musician, Rudi Esch. Esch is best known as the former bass player for industrial band Die Krupps.

“There was supposed to be this big event in Düsseldorf that Rudi invited us to, celebrating the 40-year anniversary of ‘The Man-Machine,’” Jennifer says of Kraftwerk’s 1978 album. “Rudi got the sad news that the celebration was not going to be forward like he thought. We had already booked travel. At the last minute, Claudia [sister of Florian Schneider] reached out to Rudi and said, ‘Hey, if your people that are coming from America would like to stay at my chalet, they’re more than welcome to.”

“Her chalet was on the coast of France,” David adds. “When Florian’s sister says, ‘Hey, do you want to stay in Saint-Tropez,’ you’d be a fool to say no.”

In 2018, Claudia spent five days with David and Jennifer, showing them not only around Saint-Tropez, but also Düsseldorf.

“Claudia was giving us this walking tour of Düsseldorf,” David explains. “We turn down this one suburban, apartment [-lined] street and there was a gray Beetle, street-parked. In Germany, you just don’t see old cars like that on the street. I was thinking, this looks just like the Beetle they show at Kraftwerk shows [in] 3D projections. As I walked up to it, I was fully convinced [it was it]. Claudia wasn’t saying anything–she just had this wry smile.

“I looked over at one of the apartment complex’s doorways, where the Beetle was parked,” he continues. “They had this call box with push buttons and last names. I walked over and looked. There were four names. One of them was ‘F. Schneider.’

“I knew we had stumbled upon his lodging. I’m absolutely a dyed-in-the-wool fan, but there’s no way I was going to push that button at 11 at night. All I could think of is how badly I wanted that Beetle.”

David never got to talk with Florian. He died from cancer less than two years later, in 2020.

“I never had the privilege of meeting him,” David says remorsefully. “I feel robbed with his loss. I would have loved to have met him.”

Opportunity Calls

“Claudia reached out to us, and said, ‘You do know that [Florian’s] Beetle is coming up for sale at a local reseller?” David recalls. “That got the gears turning.”

“We’ve had a revolving door of interesting cars,” Jennifer says. “It’s not unusual for us to have multiple vehicles, because you can find good deals and pay cash for vehicles less than $12,000.”

“When we say interesting vehicles,” adds David, “We just sold a 1990 Corvette convertible with a six-speed. We currently have parked outside a 1990 300ZX, with a T-top and a five-speed. We have a Nissan Pao, which is wildly cool. In our garage, we have a Triumph TR6, which is all apart. Then as a daily driver we have a Fiat Abarth and a truck to tow.”

This Beetle wasn’t going to come as cheap as their other cars, but David felt compelled to purchase it. “The first reaction was who else should get it other than us?” he says. “I couldn’t think of anybody.”

“If anybody wanted the car, it would probably because it was just a ’49 Beetle,” says Jennifer. “Not necessarily because it was Florian’s car.”

They reached out to Michael Fröhlich, the well-known German car dealer who had the Beetle. “We sent him what in car-buying terms is called a love letter,” Jennifer says. “Telling him who we were, what our interest was in the car, why we felt we would be the best people to be the new owners of the car. We made him an offer and he agreed.”

“It was kind of a low offer, too,” David adds. “We looked up on the Hagerty Valuation Tools for the potential value of an immaculately restored ’49 Beetle [which stands currently at $122,000 for #1 condition]. So that’s about what we paid … without really factoring in the previous owner.”

David and Jennifer still didn’t buy the car for chump change. They needed to convince themselves why they should spend that kind of money.

“To put things in perspective, we spent more on shipping the Beetle to Tampa than we’ve ever spent buying an entire car in our lives,” David says. “We had to look at this as kind of like an IRA, like an asset on wheels. We had to justify it that way because it’s a really bonkers thing to purchase and import unless you can make it a value-add proposition.”

When it arrived in the U.S. in the middle of 2022, not everyone was as happy as David and Jennifer were when they received the Beetle.

As much as the Beatles (the band) are a part of British culture and Elvis is for America, Kraftwerk is intrinsically German. Those in the Deutschland questioned how a piece of memorabilia that’s so incredibly tied to them had left the country. In fact, the German press very vocally stated their case.

“I felt a little conflicted,” David admits. “I understand that Germans might not have the confidence that Americans could properly keep, maintain and show an important part of their musical heritage. But we’re definitely going to take the best care of it and give it a pedestal on which it will shine during our tenure of ownership. We’re not going to let them down.”

The Car Itself

David and Jennifer first drove the car in Düsseldorf. They called it 99.5% perfect.

“We didn’t realize we had a headlight and taillight out, which is very much frowned upon in Germany,” Jennifer explains. “Then we realized we had an exhaust leak, as both of us were getting high from the fumes.”

Maybe these things occurred from the time Florian last drove it to the time David and Jennifer took it for a spin. However, the two are skeptical about that.

“His house out in the suburbs, according to one of his neighbors, is always kind of overgrown, and untended,” David says. “While he did have the car perfectly restored, he was perfectly all right with the exhaust eating away at his brain and with the bulbs out.”

A friend of Florian’s, Jürgen Gadder, owned the Beetle before him. Jürgen apparently liked restoring old cars, and he restored it to its original state, with the only upgrade being hydraulic brakes.

“He definitely wanted it to be an accurate representation of what people had in 1949,” David says. “You could get the standard Beetle that had no frivolity to it whatsoever or get the next step up with chrome trim and hubcaps. He made this a perfect standard Beetle. When I do drive it, I do have a sense of time travel.”

Driving it, can be a task, according to David. He gets behind the wheel of the Beetle to take it to events within 30 minutes or so of home.

“It’s a bit hair-raising to drive,” he continues. “It’s got 25 horsepower, which is enough to eventually reach 60 mph. You have to double clutch between each shift. If you don’t double clutch, you have to push the clutch in and wait for the revs drop all the way down below a thousand before you put it into next gear–and even then, you’re going to get a little crunch.

“The handling is weird,” David continues. “I’ve driven later-model Beetles, and they don’t feel so strange. In this car, when you go around a turn, there’s a point where you suddenly feel a lot of weight transfer to the rear–like you’re driving on grease.

“Of course,” he continues, “to be historically accurate, it rides on bias-ply tires, and that adds to the weirdness. And the steering doesn’t really self-center like any rack-and-pinion steering would, so it kind of feels like a tiller going down the road. Then, the traffic around you is completely oblivious to the value of this car.”

“I’m following with enough space behind it, with my wingman truck, to make sure nobody crashes into him,” Jennifer adds.

Back to The Amelia

When The Amelia came, David and Jennifer hauled their prized possession to the show field at the Ritz-Carlton.

“We had to be the grimiest, poorest, most unwashed–no entourage, no handlers,” David says jokingly, before taking a serious tone. “It’s a rarified strata of car ownership that we were invited into. It’s not lost on us, and we appreciate it.”

Not that dealing with concours vets didn’t provide a few surprises for the newbies.

“The car that was parked next to us, that car got unloaded, but the owner wasn’t there–they had a team,” David recalls. “They deposited it on the field a day early, detailed it top to bottom and then put a big plastic condom over it so the nighttime dew wouldn’t affect it.”

“Oh my goodness, I didn’t know I needed one of those,” Jennifer says of the plastic coverings.

While there might have been a bit of apprehension about being unprepared, they didn’t come empty-handed. They had towels to dry the car, of course, but more importantly, they had swag–stickers, magnets, keychains–which they gave to anyone with a remote interest in their car.

“We had a great time,” Jennifer recalls. “There were a lot of people there were being pulled by one or more in their parties as their group was walking by. It was such an early example and because it wasn’t all tricked out, like with a fancy red paint job, pearlescent whatever or chrome this or that. Because it was so stock, so demure the way it came from the factory, that’s unusual. The car was the anti-concours car.”

Perhaps that says something about its former famous owner. Why would a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and arguably one of the most influential music acts of all-time, elect to not only buy an understated car such as this 1949 Volkswagen Beetle, but also have it restored back to its original condition? Yes, he had a Gullwing and a Volkswagen van, too, but the Beetle is what he elected to drive daily.

“It appealed to his extreme sense of austerity,” David explains. “His music is an extraordinary example of minimalism. For a car, you’d be hard-pressed to find a vehicle more minimal than an early Beetle.”

Yet, for the someone in post-WWII Germany, the rise of the Beetle provided some much-needed hope for the country’s future.

“[Florian is] also proud of his nation,” David continues. “The Beetle certainly comes with baggage, regarding its past. But, at the same time, it was a triumph of automotive engineering.”

After The Amelia, David and Jennifer have continued to bring their Volkswagen Beetle to shows whenever and wherever they can.

“I want the whole world to know this car was owned by Florian Schneider,” David says. “Americans don’t know the importance of Kraftwerk. You can go to any pub in England, and some cross-eyed drunk will know Kraftwerk and be able to hum a few bars of a few different songs.

“By owning this car, bringing it to places and setting up our 6-foot-, 4-inch-tall Schneider cardboard cutout and handing out our cards, I think we’re expanding on the legacy of the band. Because I couldn’t begin to count the number of people that, since meeting us and the car, [have said,] ‘I’m going to have check Kraftwerk out.’”