Old Beetle takes prize for the most popular car

There are still 44,540 pre-1979 Beetles on German roads. Photo / Supplied

First place in the German vehicle registration statistics of all vehicles produced before 1979 goes to a car that brings a smile to people's faces even today - the Volkswagen Beetle.

There are still 44,540 of them on the streets in Germany, says the country's Automotive Manufacturers Association.

Around 15.8 million Beetles were made in three factories in Germany from 1938 to 1980, including 330,000 Cabriolets. All up, 21,529,464 were built on five continents.

VW this year is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the soft-top bug built by specialist Karmann. This was in the range until January 1980. In Germany, the production of the hard-top Beetle stopped in January 1978.

The technical highlights came in the beginning of the 1970s with the models 1302 and 1303. In 1972, the model 1302 replaced the Tin Lizzy, the Ford Model T, as the world's most-produced car. The production finally stopped in July 2003. The last car was produced in Mexico.

Three-quarters of all German classic cars - 30 years and older - were produced in Germany, in which Volkswagen had 24 per cent.

Second place in the VDA classic statistics goes to Mercedes-Benz, followed by Opel with the Kadett, and the other German "people's car", the East German communist-era Trabant. Around 7300 Trabants are still in use in unified Germany.

About 315,000 cars built before 1979 are on German roads, or roughly 1 per cent of the country's cars.

Meanwhile, VW won't comment on reports that it wants to buy bankrupt Karmann.

German weekly magazine De Spiegel quoted an unidentified VW manager saying that VW wants to invest several million euros "in the two-digit range" to buy Karmann, which filed for bankruptcy protection this year.

VW and Karmann have reportedly been negotiating a price for several weeks, but have not yet come to an agreement.