I hate Beetles. That felt so good, I’m going to say it again. Beetles. I hate them. There. That was so cathartic I need a cigarette. Look, I can’t help being the pantomime villain around here. It’s why The Autopian hired me. Every great American cultural enterprise needs an evil mustache-twirling Brit chewing the literary scenery to elevate it above the horde, and it’s the role I was born to play.
Disliking Beetles (as opposed to The Beatles, whom I also hate) feels like an indefensible stance, unlike say, hating celery or the New England Patriots. Both are completely reasonable positions, and should you put them to a normal person, they’ll shrug their shoulders, agree with you, and get on with the rest of their day. Hating the single best-selling model of car ever made with legions of adoring fans speaks to a raging schism at the very core of my being. VW sold twenty-one and a half million of the bloody things, so that’s a lot of happy Beetle owners versus me. Maybe I’m a fundamentally broken person with a penchant for impossible odds.
My intense loathing for them is irrational, the purest kind of hatred. It just exists without explanation. It insists upon itself. Hating Beetles reminds me of being eight years old and being filled with the overwhelming urge to punch that pathetic kid in school who constantly forgot his gym kit and kept wetting himself. Picking on the Beetle is a new low, even for me. I started therapy recently, so let’s indulge in some here and see if we can figure out why I’m feeling these unfamiliar human emotions.
I Just Can’t Find Anything Redeeming About Them
Before we begin, I want to explain how I approach this tawdry business of writing about cars and car design. I try to cast out my own preconceptions and biases and figure out what’s important to the person who might be buying a particular car. It’s more nuanced than just saying a car is good or bad. There are no truly bad cars anymore. What’s important is whether a car works for its intended purpose and how it might fit into your life. When I’m wearing my car designer Fedora, I should be able to parse out the form and content of a car and place it in historical context. Why does this car exist in the form that it does? What circumstances led to its creation? What were the economic, engineering, or societal factors that influenced its final design? What I’m saying is I should be able to remove my visceral dislike of the ass engined Nazi staff car and dispassionately find something about it I can champion. Or at least construct into a two-thousand-word argument I can get paid for. But when it comes to the Beetle, I just can’t. It’s beyond my dubious talent as a writer and outside my makeup as a human being to say anything good about them without metaphorically crossing my fingers behind my back. I can’t do it.
The first memories I have of the crappy little things are from when I was young. My squishy and underdeveloped child brain couldn’t understand why Beetles didn’t look like any other car on the road. I knew they were called Volkswagens because I could read the badges on the back, and in my paltry collection of diecasts was a miniature souped-up version – number 31 in the Matchbox 1-75 range toy car fans. Pushing it around the seventies brown carpet the usual brum brum little car noises I made weren’t right because Beetles made an annoying ring-a-ding sound from their assholes that sounded like nothing else on the road. In my tiny head, Beetles were simply wrong at being a car. In time-honored working-class east London fashion, my bastard stepfather was a part-time kerbside cowboy mechanic for friends. One of his regular customers owned an orange Beetle 1303S. Apparently this was some sort of special and rare Beetle, which sounds like an oxymoron if ever I typed one. All I knew was it kept him in cash-in-hand work because it was always breaking down, and one night it caught fire. It’s possible he was as bad a mechanic as he was a father.
Clearly I’m transposing the trauma of my childhood onto the poor Beetle, and that’s why I can’t stand them. Except I don’t believe for one second that’s the case. It was all a very long time ago, and those scars , while still visible, have mostly healed over. But my passionate loathing for Beetles continues to rage unabated. My mate Beer Boy is big into drag racing. He’s always sending me pictures of Volkswagens that have gone all manner of wild transformation in the name of getting down the quarter mile as fast as possible, and no amount of alcohol injection or candy flake paint is going to change the fact that my reaction to these cars is that they are extremely stupid. He reminisced about owning a 400bhp Beetle that regularly caught other cars unawares. My reply to that was Beetles are so slow it takes 400bhp to make one move like a 200bhp car. They’re performance sucking vortex – gas goes in and that stupid spanners in a tumble dryer engine note is the only thing that comes out.
Man Of The People Doesn’t Like People’s Car
Putting a Beetle next to other drag machines is unfair. Let’s compare it to its contemporaries, the other classic post-war people’s cars. Despite all the grasping pretention and high-minded hot air I expel here I am very much homo populi. When the collapse comes, I’ll be joining my brothers and sisters around the brazier as we attempt to barbecue the last non-radioactive rat, not sitting in an ivory spaceship awaiting lift off to Mars. People’s cars are very close to my heart. Minis have a classless, bulldog puppy charm I’m slowly warming to. In true pretentious wanker fashion I can see myself writing a travelogue about waxing across the dunes of North Africa in a Renault 4. Although it’s a close run thing, the Fiat 500 is more appealing to me than Sophia Loren tumbling out of the kitchen with a plate of spaghetti, although admittedly, as classic transport, their total lack of speed renders them suitable only for local coffee runs.
Although notionally post-war cars, both the Beetle and the Citroen 2CV crucially had their engineering laid out pre-war. They both had compact space-saving torsion bar suspension, air-cooled boxer engines on the driven axle, and a platform chassis that facilitated the bolting on of alternate bodies. Like the Beetle, the 2CV also enjoyed an extended, decades-long production run – it didn’t leave the UK market until 1990. The 2CV is a French Beetle built the right way around. They’re a bit lentil soup and too much this week’s auto-journo fad for me, but I don’t viscerally despise 2CVs in the same way I do la Coccinelle. Let me put it this way – if you said you had a 2CV outside, I’d want a go. You’d have to force me into the driver’s seat of a Beetle at gunpoint – and it isn’t because the 2CV is French and the VW is German. Give me the choice of anywhere to live in Europe, and Germany would be top of the list. I would say Norway because it’s stunning and I have dear friends there, but have you seen what it costs to get a drink in Oslo? I’d be broke before I was plastered. Nope, it’s the land of currywurst, breakfast beer, unrestricted autobahns, and a thriving goth scene for me.
So it’s not nostalgia, the Beetle’s proletarian nature or its nationality that’s repelling me from them, nor the fact that they are epically slow. Despite my disparagement, the Beetle was designed around a clear set of Modernist design ideas. Although initially conceived by the world’s worst art school failure, it was designed by one of the greatest automotive minds of the time, Ferdinand Porsche. He had help forming the Beetle’s distinctive shape from aerodynamicist Paul Jaray and more than a little influence from Tatra, and, really, a whole set of other automotive engineers of the time. The ethos behind its creation was the ‘motorization of the German people’. According to ‘Fifty Cars That Changed The World’:
“Nevertheless, the Beetle was conceived, all at once, as a single integrated engineering solution with no ‘ad hoc’ solutions or ‘legacy’ components from earlier models. The body structure was superb, rigid, watertight and corrosion-resistant, and the quality of the mechanical parts was unusually high for a popular car. Germany’s preeminence in electromechanical engineering also meant that the electrical equipment (starter motor, ignition equipment and dynamo), often the Achilles’ heel of most budget cars at the time, was excellent, so a Beetle always started on cold, damp mornings. The VW’s success was a triumph of good engineering over questionable chassis design.”
Nobody Wanted To Build It
When the dust settled after the war most manufacturers had to resort to what they had been selling back in 1939. So in 1946 when the Beetle appeared it did have some advantages over the pre-war crocks everybody else was peddling. At the end of hostilities Wolfsburg came under British control and the British government tried to get domestic manufacturers interested in the weird device by giving away the car and the factory for nothing. Even at that bargain price, according to The Guardian Lord Rootes dismissed the Beetle for being too ugly and too noisy. I know how he felt. Eventually the British gave up trying to fob VW off and dumped it in the hands of Heinz Nordhoff, an ex-Opel director.
By the time the Fiat 600 and Mini appeared in 1955 and 1959 respectively the Beetle, in Europe at least, was starting to look pathetically out of date. But in the United States it became a protest vehicle driven by the sort of people who use plants for both eating and bathing. The Beetle’s simple ass-backwards engineering and homespun thriftiness was turned into a virtue against the conspicuously consumptive boats Harley Earl was designing. It achieved this counter-cultural sleight of hand with the help of a genuinely groundbreaking advertising campaign. Now I’m a sucker for a good advert and consider the best work to be high art as much as the next art school skin chimney but even those Doyle Dane Bernbach spots are not winning me over.
Over sixty-five years of production, VW did incrementally improve the car, introducing minor updates every year – far more than Citroen did with the 2CV or BMC et al did with the Mini. But the Volkswagen was conceptually still the same little obstreperous motorized saucepan lid in 2003 that it was in 1938. If longevity was a characteristic to be celebrated I laid out a particularly long turd down the U-bend this morning and I don’t see that appearing on t-shirts, having models made of it or celebratory parties being thrown with thousands of unwashed trust fund radicals in attendance. A Beetle is all the most miserable and undesirable things you don’t want in a car: they’re slow. They’re heroically ugly. They’re noisy. They have terrible rear suspension. The essentially similar 2CV at least has joie de vivre about it, a sense of Gallic fun epitomized by being on the door handles in a corner at 20 mph. Beetles are just sad sacks of spartan dourness – flaccid body work flopping drooping towards the tarmac and a generally pathetic demeanor, woefully coalesced into a hunchback of concentrated crapiness. There’s not one decent quality in a Beetle that I couldn’t get in another, more preferable car.
Twenty-one point five million Beetles. Think of all the congestion that could be eased and human hearing saved by destroying them all. The roads would be freer, quieter, and the world a much more beautiful place. Just leave me one chassis please, so when time and resources allow, I can build a goth Meyers Manx beach buggy. It doesn’t matter what year. They’re all the same damn car.
I still think they’re cute as hell and back in the day they were fun to drive when they were running. There’s the rub. Back in the day way too many of these things were on the side of the road with the hood up. How they got a reputation for reliability was beyond me. Beetles and Corvairs were the first cars needing rescue when it snowed. Another myth I never understood. However, several cute girls drove Beetles when I was in high school. When they asked me if I liked their cars the answer was ALWAYS yes. Cute girls memory equals happy Beetles memory.
Well, if the hood was up, it wasn’t a reliability issue!
I see what you did there.
Meh. When I saw the headline, I thought this would end with me challenging Adrian to a duel for insulting my favorite car. But honestly, nothing here is incorrect. The Beetle was revolutionary when new, but that was a very long time ago. Compared to almost anything built in the last 60 years, they are slow, loud, uncomfortable, and not even particularly efficient. I love these cars enough to own two of them, but I will acknowledge their appeal has nothing to do with being good transportation appliances.
That being said, I love that they are unique. In 2025 I find myself having progressively fewer opinions on new cars. People occasionally ask me what car they should buy, and my response is something to the effect of “If you like it and it is in your price range, just buy it. They are all pretty much the same anyway.” The Beetle may not be an objectively good car, but it is nice cars exist that are distinct enough for people to have strong opinions. I find it hard to believe anyone will have a strong enough opinion to publish a rant about any 2025 model year econobox in 2075.
Some opinions, like Adrian’s, are insane and objectively incorrect, but at least the Beetle is distinct enough for us all to have an opinion.
I’m always correct.
My mom hated the Beetle so much that she effectively threatened to disown me or my siblings if any of us even thought about buying one; even the new ones. Her hatred came about because she had an older sibling who was in one that was involved in an accident and killed when my mom was a teenager (in the late 60s). That soured her on the Beetle forever as “unsafe” (ignoring that the result probably would have been the same if they had been in any similar car from that era). She was actually kind of against the whole VW brand and I got a bit of an earful when I bought a Jetta in the 00s.
The Beetle actually had a worse safety record than the Corvair. Ralph Naser chose to use the Corvair as an example, because he wanted to go after the American car industry.
For good reasons, by the way. Unsafe at Any Speed is a really interesting book. Most of it isn’t actually about the Corvair.
Nader went after the VW, too. The sequel, Small—On Safety: The Designed-In Dangers of the Volkswagen, was published by his Center for Auto Safety a few years later.
That’s great to know, thanks! I’ve never heard of that one. I’ll have to look for a copy.
Well, I’ve found one thing we disagree about, because I think the Beetle looks pretty good, and they are just adorable in a way few other cars are (maybe coloured by Herbie movies and Transformers comic books)
I do share some of your hate towards VW though, but mostly for everything they’ve made ever since the beetle. and I don’t even think it’s very irrational,they just don’t know/care how to make interesting/good cars.
I don’t understand how they could keep selling beetles longer than the late 50’s or early 60s unless they were insanely cheap compared to proper cars.
They are slow, impractical, noisy, have no real heat, except the condensation channels that make them rust faster They had a front suspension that made the frunk useless if you have a spare tire, the incremental changes makes them difficult to find correct parts for, a magnesium/aluminium engine that only weights slightly less than a cast iron inline 4 or v6, they don’t even seem easy to work on or very reliable, but I guess in some parts of the world there were probably even less reliable cars available.
I have been a passenger in one exactly once, and sitting in the front seat with the a-pillar maybe 5 inches from my face didn’t feel very safe either.
What makes this even more confusing is that this was the best VW managed to come up with for several decades until Audi engineers convinced them to finally make a Mini/Civic style car in the 70’s
It is possible that average European/Norwegian buyers are just looking for the least offensive car that gives them as little attention as possible, while not being too unreliable, with some sound deadening for the Autobahn.
In VW’s defense, having owned a dozen Ford Sierras, I do suspect some of Fords reliability issues coupled with bad winter handling were the reason we in Norway went from a sales record of Sierras in 1987 (only beaten by Tesla a few years ago) to a country where VW Golfs or Passats were the best selling cars from 1988 until electric cars caught on.
I think the reason Beetles were sold as long as they were, especially in the US, is precisely because they were both small and cheap. In the 1950s, 60s, and even into the early 70s, American car manufacturers just didn’t make anything that could compete. The few small imported cars that the Beetle did compete with were not as well-built as it was. Most Americans at the time didn’t even really want small, (relatively) efficient cars. It was not considered a threat to American manufacturers, as the post-WWII economic boom meant a lot of Americans didn’t need a super cheap car, and gas was cheap too so fuel economy wasn’t an issue. But if you didn’t have a lot of money and you wanted something new that was easy to fix and economical to run, a Beetle made a lot of sense. It wasn’t necessarily more reliable than its American contemporaries, but if something did go wrong, you could probably fix it with a couple simple tools, and replacement parts were very affordable. The Beetle was definitely outdated by the 60s, but because all of its tooling was paid for several times over due to barely changing the design, it continued to be popular for those who wanted or needed a really cheap car, until the 70s when better built, more modern, and more fuel efficient Japanese imports started taking over due to the oil crisis. This is also when American manufacturers really started feeling threatened by imported cars and finally made an effort to compete with them directly. All of that finally killed off the Beetle in the US. But before that happened, if you wanted something affordable, easy to work on, relatively fuel efficient, or just different, you got a Beetle.
About the engine weighing barely less than an iron inline 4, one must take into account that it’s an all-inclusive unit. It drops out with the muffler and cooling tins attached. One must weigh a comparable water-cooled engine with its radiator, fan, fan shroud, plumbing and muffler to really make an apples-to-apples comparison.
The magnesium wasn’t really a weight-saving measure, it was selected for its heat conductivity, same as the aluminium. The cylinders themselves are heavy because the fins.
You can consider them metal-cooled: Heat travels to the fins, which are then cooled by the air. In that sense, the aluminium fins take the role of the water around the cylinders and heads. Or you can imagine that they skip the water, chop up the radiator into bits and weld it to the cylinders. Either way, the end result is an engine with more metal than a water-cooled one.
Another factor is that boxer engines are just heavier than inline units, but the boxer layout serves two purposes:
One is that every cylinder can get good, consistent airflow coming down from the fan due to being in pairs (flat sixes start running into uneven cooling, the middle cylinder of each bank gets hotter than the front and rear cylinders).
The other is that they allow weight to be reduced elsewhere, as the lower vibrations require less damping of the engine mounts and less reinforcement of components all around the car to keep them from rattling loose. It’s the kind of thing that saves an ounce here and a dollar there, but it all adds up.
This is the reason air-cooled boxers are used in most small piston aircraft: it’s the lightest complete drive unit with the least vibration.
The end result is not as much a light engine, but more so an engine that enables the whole car to be light.
Thank you for this. I always thought I was the only one who hated Beatles. Turns out, I’m not as alone as I thought.
One of my-exes simply could not compute this. It made her angry I didn’t like them.
I agree with the sentiments the author has written above and particularly enjoy the way it was written. However, one great thing about the beetle is it gave us the Type 2 transporter/kombi. Which I suggest although offering all the ‘qualities’ of the beetle negates it by having supremely practical packaging. Thoughts?
I hate the transporter/kombi too. It does nothing better than any other van.
A slower Beetle. Fucking marvellous.
I have a soft spot for them. Call it patriotism (Brazil is teeming with the things), but there’s just something about the packaging that enamors me. It’s not a vehicle made for a civilized land with paved roads and highways, but for a fractured, barely-agrarian world. Watching them bounce along unpaved country roads really gives them an air of heroism.
As an austere mechanical device for cheaply traversing a hostile world, it’s superb. Think of it as a crossover: a single-axle hand-tractor supposited, transmission-first, under the rear seat of the the simplest viable facsimile of a sedan. You get tractor-like traction from the rear, with sedan-esque livability where the people go.
Like a Muppet, it’s really the hand up its rear that’s doing all the work, the front half is just a friendly felt husk. If it moves like a hand and grips like a hand, it just might be handier than a real frog.
No comment on external styling. Whether it’s iconic or rides on a flimsy canoe of nostalgia is an entirely different matter. Good enough for a Muppet, probably.
I can assure you that the hand up my rear is doing absolutely no work at all.
It’s strange to me that they stood out to you so much. When I was a kid they were so common they were just part of the background, just another type of car. That’s a Beetle, that’s a Rabbit. That’s a Corvette, that’s an RX-7, that’s an AMC Eagle. I can’t even force myself to see the design as being barely changed from the ’30s, a Beetle’s just a thing that is and always has been and is always just like that.
Please forgive me Jason; I grew up with air-cooled VWs so they’re naturally part of the fabric of my youth, so there’s a soft spot I have for these things. However, I would never, never, ever want to own one. When we dumped that last of them (a 1973 Type 4) for a Volvo 245, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
Seeing a Beetle my mind automatically goes to unpleasantness. Hot, strange-smelling vinyl that left waffle-pattern shapes on your bare legs. No real heater even when the things were rather new and the flaps on the ducts hadn’t rusted shut. Don’t even think about air conditioning, or rear windows that rolled down. Ever own a car where you needed to carry an ice scraper to shave the inside of the windshield?
I liked riding in the space behind the rear seats of the Bug until I was too big to do so, at which point I just wondered how you were supposed to put luggage back there and actually get to it without serious contortion. Would it have killed them to make the rear glass open? That frunk? You could increase capacity twofold by putting on a bumped up hood with a fake Rolls Royce grille. Does that make sense? Is that really a great design?
Honestly, after ten years in when VW saw the 1959 Mini they should have just said “oh, damn, there’s the way to go; let’s just do that” instead of waiting a decade and a half more to do it (and hiring an Italian guy to design it).
I’m sure they were fun to drive, but I was too young to know, so maybe that would change my mind? Anyway, if you see no more posts from me, it’s probably Jason seeking vengeance.
Is this finally proof the Jason and The Bishop are NOT the same person?
Either that or someone is off his meds.
That rear cargo area is one reason (of many) why the Beetle’s single, default body style should’ve been a 4-door.
Loved the rant! I too very much dislike the VW Beetle. They are loud, uncomfortable, underpowered, poorly-built twee machines. Let’s not even talk about the “New” Beetle…
Corrosion resistant? – not the ones I grew up with. First the heater boxes would rust out, leaving you with no heat. Then the running boards would go next, followed by the floor pan and fenders.
The first Beetle (a 1300) I drove was in the final death throes from rust and only ran on three cylinders. We drove it around a relative’s farm, learning to drive stick and laughing our heads off. I have fond memories but if I was to buy one today, it would have to be a Karmann Ghia.
Growing up in the 90s in NY, I had no idea that these cars used to be so prevalent. I was into cars from a young age, so I was very aware of ones that stood out, and Beetles stood out. Outside of car shows, I probably haven’t seen a dozen in my lifetime. They were the hero car from Herbie and from old hippy movies and in my mind must have been rare even in their heyday.
I found out later that my mom had one when she was a teenager. She got it used and drove it for a couple winters until it rusted away. Along with apparently every other one on the road at that time.
Huh. You’ve pretty much described my automotive wish list.
I’ve owned two Beetles, a ’74 and a ’77, and found them to be… fine. The main reason I’m in no hurry to own another one is that I grew tired of the fact that an unusually wide range of repairs involve removing the engine. It’s not a difficult task but it got old.
Adrian, I think it’s understandable you would find the Beetle objectionable. By the time you gnawed your way out of the birth canal, the Beetle was an obsolete anachronism, clearly inferior to contemporary cars. How can one favorably compare a Beetle to your beloved 70s Capris?
In the early to mid 50s US, though, the Beetle was a rarity: a small car that was cheap to buy and operate and reasonably reliable. My father’s first vehicle was a ‘57 Beetle, which he purchased as a 19-year old new father in his first year as an engineering student. The Beetle fit needs. That was replaced in 1963 by a VW bus and face it, those were just Beetles that stuck a thumb in their mouths, blew hard and popped out a bigger, taller ass like some freak balloon animal trick.
The 60s brought two things that drastically affected the Beetle: Japanese imports and the counter culture. European small cars still had trouble swimming across the pond then, so their impact was negligible, excepting piddling few Minis, MGs and Triumphs floated home by servicemen. Japanese cars, however, presented excellent value in small packages that mostly looked like real cars. This promoted ready adoption by mainstream economy buyers and the Beetle would’ve died in America if not for Flower Power, the Summer of Love, and Laurel Canyon and maybe LSD.
Thus the Beetle moved from practical choice to symbol and extended its appeal and life in America. Those who were dropping out selected Beetles and their ilk as a statement. Wanna be’s bought them to look hip. A cult was born.
Now some people really like Beetles (and 2CVs, etc.) because they’re quirky and “fun,” but no one buys a Beetle after 1965 because it was the best choice in small cars.
By the time your presence was felt in the world, there were dozens upon dozens of superior small cars in value, design, performance and economy, so I’m not surprised little Adrian rejected the homely bug. Especially as yours is an artistic soul, if you believe in that sort of thing.
I am relieved that you do hold out a place in your world for the Meyers Manx, the single greatest Beetle derivative and as kick ass a ride as ever was. If you can think of the Beetle as a progenitor of the Manx, perhaps you will view it more kindly. Or not.
Add in that Adrian is British, so aroung him growing up small cars were the norm and the Beetle wasn’t especially tiny, just much less space efficient than the Issigonis BMC cars and their successors.
> you gnawed your way out of the birth canal,
Apt, but ow.
John Muir (not the naturalist)(I think) wrote how to keep your VW alive for the complete idiot and cemented the VW in the mind of the counterculture.
He was a distant relative of the naturalist and an early crunchy granola dropout himself. Somewhere, I still have a battered copy of his VW book.
I was painstaking created in a top secret seventies National Health Service laboratory in Scarfolk.
You can’t get them all right Scarfolk. Hopefully the next batch came out with a little better outcome.
PS I enjoy your writing.
National Health Services, huh? That explains a lot.
Parts of it are amazing, parts of it are utterly shit. But no-one goes bankrupt for their health, and it is an institution to be cherished.
We usually die before full bankruptcy occurs, mostly from exhaustion brought on by trying to find a doctor in our health plans.
US citizen here. Point acknowledged.
Your description of how the VW Microbus/Transporter developed made me laugh out loud.
Thank you.
Can we get a part 2 where you just talk about your hate for the Beatles?
The only good song of theirs is about hanging out with a girl all night at her place, then she goes to sleep, and he doesn’t get laid. He wakes up and she’s gone so he sets her place on fire. “so I lit a fire, isn’t it good. Norwegian wood.”
I got my permit in a 74 Super Beetle. 2 weeks after I purchased my first vehicle, I swapped out my first motor —in a 72 Westfalia . I learned to wrench because of the Idiot’s Guide—and have a signed copy of the exploded beetle from it on my wall today.
All that said, I turned down a basically mint dirt-cheap Super Beetle a couple years back because the only thing I currently want a Beetle for is Class 11 dirt fun (can’t do that with the strut front end).
This article had some of the vituperation and a bit of the venom I’ve come to respect and love from our Goth Uncle—but no conclusion. With no climax, I’m left hanging. Wouldn’t insult you by offering a hug—so I’ll just wait for the next article by Autopian’s Dark Soul
My father, who made extra money on the side by building hopped-up air-cooled motors and fixing VW’s when I was a little kid, and drove a Baja bug to his regular job, once said in a moment of clarity in the mid- ’70’s “Y’know, for as slow as they are, they should get 50mpg and they sure as heck don’t”.
I never forgot that, the Beetle bug never bit me, I built hot-rodded Mazda rotaries as a young man. If I’m getting lousy mileage, I want speed.
A Jason level hate rant. I love it.
Now I want to see you redesign it in to something you don’t passionately want to burn to the ground.
I’d use the 1947 Volkhart V2 Sagitta as a starting point. And make it with mechanical-injection diesel and NiFe-battery EV options to go along with gasoline. We could have had a 70+ mpg diesel and a small EV with Nissan Leaf range in the 1940s.
What I like about them:
The Rear engine RWD layout makes them surprisingly capable off road and in the snow
Air cooled Engine.
That being said I agree the 2CV is the better car. Maybe if we let the Beetle die at the end of WWII instead of breathing new life into it, the 2CV would have taken its place, there would be a crap ton more of the twin engine 4WD models, as well as more of the vans, and possibly new models like a twin engine 4WD van variant.
While there are cars I don’t like, I don’t ever advocate for their genocide, I’m more of a ‘don’t make any more of them and let them live long happy lives’ kind of person.
‘Hating Beetles reminds me of being eight years old and being filled with the overwhelming urge to punch that pathetic kid in school who constantly forgot his gym kit and kept wetting himself.’
Therapy is a terrible thing, you pay money to learn self loathing, we pay money to you(sort ofish) only to learn about that one day you forgot your gym kit.
As usual, I’m several pages ahead of my therapist.
The beetle is joy in ugliness. What makes it lovable is that it is a piece of shit. It is a box of broken crayons in automobile form, and the joy in one is the same as the other.
I test drove one when I was in the market to replace my first car c. 1977; it was in the running along with some much better cars, but I was curious. And yes, it was awful–the steering was ponderous and I was wondering “why would I want to drive something that feels 40 years old?” and no, I never wanted to drive one again.
The Beatles, on the other hand, what can I say. You don’t really love rock ‘n roll if you don’t at least like the Beatles and can’t find at least a half-dozen of their bangers that still bang as hard as anything bangs. IMHO. YMMV.
You have every right to your opinion.And I see some validity to it. The Beetle *was* a great car, and very fit to purpose… in inter-war 1930s Germany. By the time the 2nd war was over, it was already largely obsolete.
It is amusing they basically built a 1930s car for almost 70 years. I’m not sure that reality struck the old VW guys. They just kind of loved them for some odd reason. And somehow the answer is always taking the engine out because it’s only a few bolts. I’m often amused at the account of Ford’s people being taken the bombed out vw plant by the British guy in change they wanted nothing to do with it. It was old technology then and a mess. Maybe there is a lesson in that sometimes you don’t need to be bleeding edge to make something the world needs. I’ve heard many accounts from WWII vets the Germans just left them everywhere and they would just get in them and drive them. Then some of them liked them enough to bring them back.
I hate The Beatles.
VW Beetle chassis make an excellent kit car platform, that being said.
Don’t worry. I think they’ll just have you drive a MG Midget for a few months.