Car of the Century

The Car of the Century (COTC) was an international award given to the world's most influential car of the 20th century. The election process was overseen by the Global Automotive Elections Foundation. The winner, the Ford Model T, was announced at an awards gala on December 18, 1999 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The selection process

An elaborate and formal process for deciding the Car of the Century was devised. It started in October 1996, when a list of 700 cars was offered by the COTC organising committee as candidates for the award, which their experts had selected from recommendations made from within the car industry and from car clubs.

In February 1997 a list of 200 eligible cars was announced at the AutoRAI motor show in Amsterdam, having been selected from the 700 by an honorary committee of experts who were all independent and highly respected and experienced automotive experts.

The next step was for a jury of 133 professional automotive journalists from 33 different countries, under the presidency of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, to reduce the list to 100, and the result was announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1997.

The Century: America's Time

The Century: America's Time is a 15-part series of documentaries produced by the American Broadcasting Company about the 20th century and the rise of the United States as a superpower. The documentary originally aired on The History Channel in 1999. Another earlier series, simply called "The Century" also produced by ABC, appeared on the ABC network in 1999, and also later appeared on the History Channel. It consists of six two-hour shows with each chronicling two different events based around a common theme. The narrator of both series was Peter Jennings, anchor from ABC World News Tonight.

Along with distinguished journalist Todd Brewster, Jennings co-authored a book titled The Century which became a national bestseller. This series is part of the History Channel's "Cable in The Classroom" curriculum and the study guides for each episode can be found on their website, under the letter "C".

ABC ran a mini-marathon of the series on Saturday September 15, 2001 in reaction to the September 11th Attacks. The marathon signaled the transition from 24/7 news coverage, which had gone uninterrupted since the first reports of an incident at the World Trade Center, back to "normal" programming.

Volkswagen Beetle

The Volkswagen Beetle (officially the Volkswagen Typ 1, informally in Germany the Volkswagen Käfer and in the U.S. as Volkswagen Bug) is a two-door, four passenger, rear-engine economy car manufactured and marketed by German automaker Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 until 2003.

The need for this kind of car, and its functional objectives, were formulated by Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, wishing for a cheap, simple car to be mass-produced for the new road network of his country. He contracted Ferdinand Porsche in 1934 to design and build it, after telling him in 1933 "This is the car for my roads" of the extremely similar Tatra V570. Porsche and his team took until 1938 to finalise the design, and said of the Tatra influence "sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine". In 1965, a payment of one million Marks was made to Tatra-Ringhoffer for numerous patent infringements by the Beetle design. The result is one of the first rear-engined cars since the Brass Era. With 21,529,464 produced, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made.