HOW THE BUS WAS BORN

Three quarters of a century ago, a visitor to Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg factory did a simple sketch that would change the automotive world. That person was Dutchman Ben Pon, and the scribbled, simplistic drawing he did in a small, lined notebook was of a van with rounded lines, based on Beetle principles with an air-cooled engine at the rear and the driver right at the front. The date was 23 April 1947, and just over two and a half years later, the real things would start rolling off production lines. Millions more would follow and the name of Ben Pon would become immortalised as part of VW history.

But who was Ben Pon, and what inspired him to come up with the Volkswagen van? To answer that, we need to travel back to the Amersfoort in the Netherlands at the end of the Victorian era. There, Mijndert Pon started a shop in 1898, initially selling sewing machines, tobacco, soap and