The is a very personal opinion and subject to taste rather anything quantifiable. It’s also possible for VW to cater to more than one type of customer so take the following with a pinch of salt.
To me there’s something intellectually dishonest about these retro models.
In the original Beetle and Transporter they started with function and then gave it form. Doing it the other way round will not produce a truely desirable classic only something momentarily fashionable.
The same goes for their T-Rock model, mentioned in the article.
Instead of designing for offroad performance they’ve taken a road car and just added enough shoulder pads, fake pockets and redundant zips to puff it up to look like a small off-roader.
It’s for people who think they need to go off road but really know they never will. Its size is just large enough that they won’t feel intimidated by other vehicles when sitting traffic jams. That extra size of course come as a compromise to the vehicle real purpose as a road car.
Personally I’d much rather have a new and improved Golf or Transporter/California.
So true, from the History section of the Beatle's wikipedia page:
"In May 1934, at a meeting at Berlin's Kaiserhof Hotel, Chancellor Hitler insisted on a basic vehicle that could transport two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph) while not using more than 7 litres of fuel per 100 km (32 mpg US/39 mpg UK). The engine had to be powerful for sustained cruising on Germany's new Autobahnen. Everything had to be designed to ensure parts could be quickly and inexpensively exchanged. The engine had to be air-cooled because, as Hitler explained, not every country doctor had his own garage. (Ethylene glycol antifreeze was only just beginning to be used in high-performance liquid-cooled aircraft engines. In general, radiators filled with water would freeze unless the vehicle was kept in a heated building overnight or drained and refilled each morning.)"
>Instead of designing for offroad performance they’ve taken a road car and just added enough shoulder pads, fake pockets and redundant zips to puff it up to look like a small off-roader.
This is actually an extremely popular segment these days (see Audi Q1/Q3, Mercedes GLA, BMW X1, Mazda CX-3, Škoda Karoq, Peugeot 1008, Kia Stonic, etc. etc.) which apparently outsells the previously most popular "Golf" class of cars. By a lot.
People seem to like the higher sitting position and feel safer with more puffed up form of these cars. Even if they have significantly less space inside.
Don’t discount sitting position as a major benefit for many consumers. When everyone else is driving them, you feel at a disadvantage in a normal car when it comes to seeing the road in traffic. An arms race so to speak.
I find the Q3, X1, GLA as well as the MDX and so on absolutely gaudey in appearance. They don’t look nice at all.
I find that the people who feel "safer" or whatever in these cars tend to be the worst drivers. Also, they often pull into intersections to make left turns without moving their car, making it impossible to turn until the light goes yellow or red. I really wish there were fines or demerit points for doing that shit.
That, and/or require stricter licensing for larger cars. Giving a skittish person who doesn't "feel safe" in a normal car an even bigger car where they're more insulated from their surroundings is a recipe for disaster.
I just want to add to this that many older people with hip issues really appreciate higher sitting positions. Might not be market-making but I'm sure it's a factor in many purchases
Agree on the beetle, not on the t-roc.
My parents just bought one. Their reasons: they like to feel “tall” on the road, but they hate SUVs and jeep-style cars so this is the right compromise.
There are lots of cars where form follows function. A Toyota Camry, for example. The form follows from its function as a safe, cost-effective family sedan. All other cars with the same function are slight variations on the theme.
If you want interesting forms, you have to start with an interesting function. The Beetle was a novel combination of function and cost constraints in its day. So were the classic Jeeps.
But if you want a safe, cost-effective family sedan, there's no way you can follow that function to get a form much different than a Camry. Thus all such cars look like a Camry with some gratuitous styling.
The new 500 is more different from the old one than the new Mini to the old one.
The original cinquecento was half as big; you could literally make a U-Turn in a single lane, because of the rear engine, you could turn the wheel to unbelievable angles. When you were more than 1.85 m high, you had to drive it with the sun roof open (and half your head outside) because it was so small. you could park at 90° to other cars because the car was so short (it's probably not as long as a modern Dodge RAM is wide). However you could still cram 4 people inside with some luggage and (very slowly) ride around.
This reminds me of Nokia's demise. Before they were sold to Microsoft, everyone was saying how they'd all buy Nokias if they would just adopt Android. We all know how that went.
It's clear to everyone at the moment that a moderately priced electric beetle would sell like hotcakes. But just like Nokia made the wrong call, it looks like VW will do the same.
> It's clear to everyone at the moment that a moderately priced electric beetle would sell like hotcakes.
I don’t know anyone among my friends or relatives who wants/likes beetle. So I don’t think it’s so “clear” as you are saying. They probably have data to backup beetle cancellation
Bmw looks better, those shevy and Nissan cars are for different demographic who don’t really care about styling but more about getting the cheapest thing. Beetle is not of these
The target demographic for the modern VW Beetle seems to be aging boomers and 30-something hipsters who want something small and economical but appealing to their sense of nostalgia. The emphasis for VW is on the nostalgia factor. The content on their US website attests to this: "The original original", "Shift into overjoy", and a product tie in with Fender guitars. The newer Beetles are basically baseline Golfs with a Beetle shape. Nothing exactly special about them compared to classic Bugs. All of the modern Beetles are front-engine, front-wheel-drive, with the latest having the requisite turbocharged 2.0 liter engine, like every other staid econobox these days.
The immediately previous (retro, but not original) beetle design was extremely popular with women. So much so that the current beetle was redesigned to be more appealing to men. I haven’t seen many on the road, so no idea who they are popular with now in practice.
Actually I‘d probably buy this new VW Minibus, while I could care less about a beetle. The Minibus is always as history laden as the beetle, and it’s so much more versatile. In a world of autonomous cars, small cars will become ubiquitous and interchangeable since we don’t need to own them anymore to get to work, while big vehicles like the Minibus are more likely to be owned since they are needed for vacations, band tours, camping, IKEA shopping,...
The VW Mini? I own a Mini and they’re made by BMW, not by VW. Or are we talking about two different things (unlikely that BMW would let its brand be diluted by such a similar marque).
The Mini is pretty much all that is left of BMW’s acquisition of Rover [0] in 1994 - there is no chance VW is making a Mini.
I love the irony that the GP touts the Mini as being more likely to be owned as a “big vehicle”, yet in it’s original shape and size it would be perfect as a small electric vehicle!
And no, it is not clear to me that a moderately priced electric beetle would sell like hotcakes. It isn't even a particularly slippery shape, the original beetle had so much lift the front end would unload the suspension at speed.
The actual sales numbers put them way in the back of the pack. And are they actually making any money? Because LG moves 5 times more units and cannot make any kind of profit.
4.4 million phones is a good clip, esp. with how few devices Nokia has. LG has hundreds of models on sale (which is part of what bleeds their profits) while Nokia has a bit over a dozen. Much lower R&D cost, plus a smaller maintenance burden.
I have a Nokia X (wife was working at Nokia before the buy out). It wasn’t a nice phone, the software was just a kludge compared to real WP devices. I’m not sure how Nokia could have achieved their goals being just another Android brand. It works now because they are starting from zero, but back then that wasn’t the case.
WP was the better bet for Nokia, but they didn’t have any good choices at that point.
> It's clear to everyone at the moment that a moderately priced electric beetle would sell like hotcakes.
Would it, really?
The problem is that market forces are working against cheaper, smaller cars.
Does a company really want to run the gauntlet for producing a big production run and then having it flop? Especially if those sales might cannibalize purchases of their far more profitable cars?
I think the orig beetle lived on in overseas plants --Brazil, for example. But with today's global manufacturing, I guess when they say they will kill this model, they mean it will disappear everywhere.
And, I suppose it must. It had mustered all the nostalgia it could, but in the end, the well ran dry and the model had become a dead end. For a revival model, it actually remained longer than most.
It lived on because it was small, cheap and simple. The new model was neither. Like the new Mini, it was just another premium hatchback living off the name of a classic.
I add that the original Beetle also lived on because VW were able to extend the life of the original tooling, which they’d replaced when they moved to the Golf in Germany.
Fiat had the right idea with the new 500, which is small, cheap, fun and stylish. An electric Beetle the size and price of a Renault Zoe would have been something interesting.
More like a Golf minus the pesky body roll. We have a 99 Turbo Beetle, I can corner 15-20 MPH faster than my ‘03 GTI VR6. It stays flat where the GTI would have the inner rear wheel 6” off the ground.
I owned an old Beetje and the experience is all about the smell of petrol, the noise, the lack of power steering and breaking, and ofcourse the most important: the design.
The first versions of the new Beatle didn't match that design more that most Porsches imho.
Maybe nostalgia should not be used as a sellout.
I mean, the new 'mini' is bigger than my car and a familie can fit inside the new Fiat 500...
The article has drawings of a proposed new Microbus. They will have to make it more crashworthy than the original. The original had the driver so far forward it had near-zero crush depth.
Well yeah. If the cameras and sensors fail, then you'll probably want to replace them with your own eyes. That's kinda hard to do when there's a bunch of car body in the way.
Do they actually fail in practice? Seems very unusual for what is most likely a pretty discrete component. Also, does failure have to be so graceful? For example, if my windshield wipers fail during a heavy rain, I have no choice but to pick t my hazard lights on and move off the road. If my car tells me my sensors are broken, I can see doing the same for that.
Driving with technology is so much safer anyways, it’s like constant awareness without needing to look backwards (and consequently not look forward).
There's not enough data for cars specifically to know if they do anything in practice, let alone fail. With other things, though, cables come loose and voltages get spiked/sagged and so on - yeah, not common failures, but common enough to be forseeable.
My point, though, is more that if these sensors do indeed fail, I'd much prefer to be able to have at least enough ability to sense my environment to still safely navigate, even if I have to do so with much greater caution. That is: losing my sensors shouldn't be as catastrophic as losing my windshield wipers in a heavy downpour.
In this case I’m talking about the double A pillars, not the D pillars. Backup cameras are fine. But seeing someone approaching a residential intersection on foot or on bike is important.
Ya, I agree. My tech package can capture pedistrians behind and aside, but not front (and preemptive breaki is disabled at slow speeds). It seems like technology will enable new designs (and ultimately, a fully autonomous car doesn’t really need windows at all).
A friend who does networking @ VW tells me they're working on an electric bus. But last I heard it was kind of fancy and expensive, not a low-cost eco-friendly hippy RV.
To me there’s something intellectually dishonest about these retro models.
In the original Beetle and Transporter they started with function and then gave it form. Doing it the other way round will not produce a truely desirable classic only something momentarily fashionable.
The same goes for their T-Rock model, mentioned in the article.
Instead of designing for offroad performance they’ve taken a road car and just added enough shoulder pads, fake pockets and redundant zips to puff it up to look like a small off-roader.
It’s for people who think they need to go off road but really know they never will. Its size is just large enough that they won’t feel intimidated by other vehicles when sitting traffic jams. That extra size of course come as a compromise to the vehicle real purpose as a road car.
Personally I’d much rather have a new and improved Golf or Transporter/California.