Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I brought the Beetle to life with a roar. Well. Not really a roar. A Volkswagen Bug doesn’t roar. But it sort of growled.–Jim Butcher
…but Not How You Think
There’s no more iconic vehicle on the planet than the original air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle that was build for 65 years from its initial design and limited pre-war production in 1938 until the final classic, air-cooled model rolled off the assembly line of the Volkswagen Plant in Puebla, Mexico in 2003. VW attempted to capture lighting in a bottle with the New Beetle (1997–2011), and I actually owned a 2001 model that like many latter day VWs, mine was beset with unending quality control issues.
VW tried again with the new but not NEW Beetle (2012-2019) and it’s a much better car then the New Beetle. So much so that eight years ago I purchased a 2016 Beetle convertible for Mary to replace her money pit Mercedes-Benz SLK 350. You can read all about her Beetle here. Compared to my previous New Beetle and even my 2002 VW GTI 337, this car has been a wonderfully dependable car and Mary loves driving it. Update: Recently the check engine light came on and it took it into the shop to see what’s up. It tuned out that the car just needed a new battery; the old one was five years old! Now it needs some new tires, a project for this week.
How I Made this Photo: I made this image of a little girl paining a Beetle at the BugFest car show in Northern Colorado that was something the organizers did for the kids at the show. The image was made with a Canon EOS 10D and EF 22-55mm f/4-5/6 zoom lens at 55mm with a Program mode exposure of 1/200 sec at f/16 and ISO 200.
All About the Bug
That 2016 Beetle that belongs to my wife is Silver, like my New Beetle, but has a lower profile while retaining an overall shape that’s (barely) reminiscent of the original Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle.The final water-cooled Beetle ever made, a Denim Blue coupe, was built on July 9, 2019 in Puebla, Mexico and will go on display at VW’s museum there.
Unlike all of these nouveau Beetles, the original air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle is beloved across age and demographic spectrums like no other car in the world. At a car show last year I talked with some young Beetle enthusiasts about why they loved their cars so much. The same reasons came up again and again and it was that the cars were cheap to buy, easy to repair, and fun to drive.
In its day the original VW Beetle was the anti-car compared to the large chrome bumpered cars of the 1950’s and amazingly enough it is the anti-car of the new millennium as it stakes a claims amongst cars that look so much alike that Toyota has take extreme (and ugly, some might say) styling measures in designing the front fascias of its and Lexus automobiles.
Yet the original VW Beetle takes us to our safe spaces where life is simple and you can paint the car with bright color and wear some flowers in your hair…
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