Tragic Loss

[Mark Mages <mmages@gie.com>]

I got this from Alan Presley in the Houston VW club

I think we all owe him (Karmann) more than a little....

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Wilhelm Karmann passes away

I just received a message this morning that Wilhelm Karmann Junior
passed
away this past Sunday, after a lengthy illness. He would have been 84
years
old on December 4.

Karmann's firm, founded by his father in the early years of this
century,
became famous for two projects for Volkswagen. Karmann conceived the
idea
of the convertible Beetle in 1949, convinced VW that they needed such a
"frivolous" car in the sober times after WW2, and then produced it at
his
plant in Osnabr˝ck, Germany. The Karmann Ghia, conceived entirely
in-house
by Karmann with body styling contracted to Luigi Segre's Carrozzeria
Ghia
design studio, gave VW its own affordable up-scale car. Later the
first-generation Scirocco would be built by Karmann.

Convertibles are a house specialty, and many carmakers seek out Karmann
when they needed a specialist to engineer and produce a drop-top version
of
their production sedans. Other clients include VW, Audi, Opel, BMW,
German
Ford, Renault, and Mercedes. The main business today, however, is
manufacture of production tooling for stamping steel panels into body
parts. They sell tooling to _every_ production automotive maker in the
world today.

For Porsche, Karmann built many 356 bodies for Porsche. Beginning in
1961,
Karmann built the "Karmann hardtop coupe," and continued to produce
regular
coupe bodies through the end of 356 production in 1965. By the end of
356
production, as Porsche switched over to the 911, almost all 356 coupe
bodies were being made by Karmann. In 1965 Karmann too switched over to
making 911/912 bodies because Porsche could not meet the demand at its
own
plant.

Karmann also built the 914 (body as well as assembly of the entire car),

sold as a VW-Porsche in the rest of the world and the Porsche 914 in the

USA.

After the passing of Ferry Porsche earlier this year, the German auto
industry has lost another of the key figures who guided it through the
postwar years and the last half of this century.



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