A Decade of Discovery
Long, long ago in a galaxy far away – or so it now seems – the idea of a website documenting the Volkswagen Special Sales Campaign Edition Beetle was conceived. A website built, maintained and updated by private individuals motivated by a shared passion for the subject without any commercial interest or support.
Although it seems much further back in time to us, SEBeetles arrived on the internet a quarter of a century ago. And to be fair, 25 years is in itself an anniversary well worth celebrating.
In those early days, the look and feel of the website was very much limited by the web technology of the time, with limited formatting and file sizes. However, it lacked collaboration on a more organised scale, because communication was mainly via email. However, even so, collaborations were being developed…
Then, around 2014, the research that had been gathering in the background started to influence and shape some major developments in both the website structure and its contents. An early example of this was the publication of a significant documentation of the paint colours used on SEBeetles manufactured in Europe. Information that was not available in a comprehensive form anywhere else. At the same time, missing gaps in the website coverage were being filled by drawing on previous print magazine articles on the subject from the 1980s.
Massive amounts of energy were put into the website development, turning it into the authoritative reference source on the subject. This included turning those early magazine-like caption narratives on the air-cooled SEBeetles into more extensive factual descriptions. These increasingly became supplemented by more and more profiles with the ever-expanding additions of the water-cooled SEBeetles.
Further development morphed those individual profiles on the SEBeetles into technical manual style descriptions in a consistent format, each providing an unparalleled level of cataloguing in detail the factory build specification of each Edition.
Development work that in turn, increasingly saw us engage in proactive, ongoing research towards documenting, as we describe it, the History VW Forgot.
As a result, the past decade has seen us discover and document a massive amount of information and the rediscovery of long-forgotten Editions. Information that has now, on many occasions, given tremendous support to enthusiasts undertaking restoration work, as well as informing and entertaining the international Beetle fraternity at large.
The list of such discoveries through our work in the past decade is impressive and includes:
- Fully uncovering and documenting the fragmented but wide-ranging “Spring Editions Story” of 1970.
- Opening up the succeeding “Pop Bug” stories of 1971 and 1972.
- Piecing together into coherent groups the 1600cc SEBeetle models based on the flat windscreen ‘1300’ Beetle as the family of VW 1300 S Editions. This includes one of the least known variations – one in black trim – destined for North America.
- The unravelling and separation of the models that had previously been confusingly all considered “Big Beetles”
- The unravelling and identification of the complex subject of the “White” 1303 (Super Beetle) convertibles into well-defined, separate individual profiles.
- The unravelling of the mysteries and confusion surrounding the paint colours used on the North American ‘Sun Bug’ Editions.
Have we managed to bottom out the complete cataloguing of all the SEBeetles yet?
The answer is “no” because there are still quite a few lines of research that have not yet come to a conclusive or complete documentation of. Something highlighted as illustrated by the latest discovery of a hitherto unknown model from an SEBeetle production batch about which we know very little – S759 the Sonderaktion “Black is Beautiful”.
The SEBeetles Team, July 2025.