Prof. Dr. h.c. Ferdinand Porsche was an Austrian automotive engineer. Porsche was born in Vratislavice nad Nisou, Bohemia, which is now part of the city of Liberec in the Czech Republic, known also as Maffersdorf in German. Porsche is best known for designing the original Volkswagen Beetle and for his contributions to advanced German tank designs: Tiger I, Tiger II and the Elefant.

Erwin Komenda (April 6, 1904 - August 22, 1966) was the designer of the bodies for the VW Beetle and various Porsche sports cars. He was born in Weyer, a little village in Upper Austria near Steyr. From 1926 to 1929 he worked as a car-body designer in the Steyrer factories. There he met Ferdinand Porsche in 1929 when Porsche joined as technical director of the Steyrer factory.

Bumblebee is the name of a fictional character from the various Transformers universes.

J Mays (born October 15, 1954 in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, USA) is currently the Group Vice President of Design and Chief Creative Officer at Ford Motor Company. His name is simply "J", named after his grandfather S J Mays. Mays is known for his "retrofuturistic" cars designs that put a futuristic spin on classics like the Volkswagen Beetle and Ford Thunderbird. Though lauded for his nostalgic touch, his focus on the past has also been criticized.

Heinrich Nordhoff (January 6 1899 - April 12 1968) was a German engineer famous for his leadership of the Volkswagen company as it was rebuilt after World War II. He is usually referred to as Heinz Nordhoff.

Matt Hales (born January 17, 1972), better known as Aqualung, is an English singer and songwriter best known in the UK for his song "Strange and Beautiful", which was featured on a television advertisement for the new Volkswagen Beetle during the summer of 2002 and went on to become a Top 10 hit in the UK singles chart later that year. In the United States, Aqualung is also known for the song "Brighter Than Sunshine", …

William (Bill) Bernbach (August 13, 1911, New York City - October 2, 1982, New York City) was a legendary figure in the history of American advertising. He was one of the three founders of Doyle Dane Bernbach and directed ad campaigns such as "Think Small" for Volkswagen Beetle (recognized by Advertising Age as the top advertising campaign of the 20th Century). Bernbach was noted for his devotion to creativity and offbeat themes, …

Kurt Lotz (born September 18, 1912, died March 9, 2005) was the second postwar CEO of the Volkswagen automobile company in Germany. He succeeded the legendary Heinrich Nordhoff after Nordhoff died in 1968. Lotz was the son of a farmer from the German state of Hesse. During World War II, he became a Luftwaffe general-staff major assigned to assessing needs for the military, which Lotz later looked back on as his first experience with industrial planning on a major scale.

Josef Ganz was a German car designer born in Budapest, Hungary. From the early 1930s he designed several small cars including the Standard Superior and Bungartz Butz. The Standard Superior was claimed by some to be the inspiration behind the Volkswagen Beetle. As a Jew he was persecuted by the Nazi regime and fled from Germany to Liechtenstein where he ran a design bureau. After World War II he worked for the Swiss Rapid car company.

Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche, mainly known as Ferry Porsche, was an Austrian technical automobile designer and automaker-entrepreneur. He operated Porsche AG in Stuttgart, Germany. His father, Ferdinand Porsche Sr was also a renowned automobile engineer. His nephew, Dr. Ferdinand Piëch, was chairman of Volkswagen from 1993 to 2002, and his son, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, was involved in the design of the 911.

Rudolf Leiding (born September 4, 1914; died September 3, 2003) was the third postwar chairman of the Volkswagen automobile company, succeeding Kurt Lotz in 1971. Under Leiding's leadership, the Volkswagen Golf was completed and went on sale in Europe in June 1974, introduced in North America as the Rabbit seven months later. The Golf was credited from saving VW from possible bankruptcy after the company had relied on the Beetle too long.

Toni Schmücker was the fourth chief executive officer of the Volkswagen automobile company following the handover of the company in 1948 to German control from the British, who had administered the VW factory in Wolfsburg, Germany after the Second World War ended. Schmücker became the head of Volkswagen in 1975, succeeding Rudolf Leiding. At the time of Schmücker's assumption of the job, …

Bob Pease is an analog integrated circuit design expert. He has designed several very successful ones, many of them in continuous production for several decades. These include the LM331 voltage to frequency converter, and the LM317 adjustable voltage regulator. Pease started work in the early 1960s at George A. Philbrick Researches (GAP-R). GAP-R pioneered the first reasonable-cost, mass-produced op amp: the K2-W. At GAP-R, Pease developed many high-performance op amps, …

J. Stuart Perkins was president of the U.S. sales subsidiary of Volkswagen, Volkswagen of America, from 1965 to 1981. During his tenure as president of VW's American operations, sales of VW cars peaked in the United States, the model lineup was greatly expanded beyond the Volkswagen Beetle with new rear-engined, aircooled cars, and Volkswagen offered its first front-wheel-drive vehicles.

Claudia Jennings (born Mary Eileen Chesterton on December 20, 1949 in St. Paul, Minnesota - died October 3, 1979 in Malibu, California) was an American model and actress. Claudia Jennings was "Playboy" magazine's Playmate of the Month in November 1969 and later Playmate of the Year 1970. Her original pictorial was photographed by Pompeo Posar. Her father was a sales manager and her mother was a college professor.

Jack "Hacksaw" Reynolds was an American football player who started out as a fullback and changed to linebacker. He was a first-round draft pick by the Los Angeles Rams in 1970 and played there 11 years before going to the San Francisco 49ers in 1981. He played with the Niners 3 more years and won 2 Super Bowls with them: Super Bowl XVI and Super Bowl XIX. He wore the number 64 throughout his career. Played in a total of 13 postseason games.

Fishka Rais (died 1974) was a South African born Canadian actor. He appeared in the children's television series "The Hilarious House of Frightenstein" as Igor and also appeared in the movie "Cannibal Girls", credited as Kingfish playing The Butcher. He owned a Volkswagen Beetle in which he used a rope to pull the clutch pedal back up. He died in 1974 during surgery to relieve his obesity.

Reinhold Schmidt (1897 - 1970?) was one of the late-comers of the 1950s UFO "contactee" era that began with George Adamski in 1953. Schmidt was born and grew up in Nebraska, where he worked for most of his adult life as a grain buyer and dealer. He entered the contactee ranks after telling of his adventures on November 5, 1957, when while driving through a rural area near Kearney, Nebraska, he noticed a large, cigar-shaped object resting in a field.