New VW Beetle Loses the Cute Factor
September 21, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 4 comments
My wife's Beetle was the first casualty of our life before kids. Lime green outside, gray interior. My wife kept the plush toy flower they give when you pick it up from the dealer in that little vase that fit into the dashboard. She loved that car. It was cute. It was her. But the moment she got pregnant—less than a year into our five-year financing—it had to go. It wasn't my decision. I thought we could pull it off. It we were smart about what kind of stroller we got and could deal with loading a car seat in a two-door, I thought we could make it. But she wasn't having it. She needed a minivan and she needed one right then.
If I'm honest, there were a few things I really liked about that little 2003 New Beetle. It was roomy as hell on the inside. I'm a fairly big guy—around 6'4"—and I never felt cramped. I liked the wheels out on the corners that made the car feel like it was hugging the road. Not exactly Lotus cornering, but it was fun. It got decent mileage, was pretty easy to park and, if you closed your eyes and pretended it was someplace else you might just recognize it as German.
Of course, none of these things excused that poor little car for being too cute, the automotive equivalent of a gossamer soap bubble hanging over a field of sunflowers and being nipped at by a golden retriever puppy. It was slow, round and so decidedly not built for men that it may as well have been named Oprah or Sarah McLachlin. I may have felt bad for my wife when we sold it, but I probably would have felt bad if I had been around when she gave up her Cabbage Patch doll. That doesn't mean I wanted to play with it. I had all but forgotten about the Beetle—save for seeing about 30 of them on my way to and from work every day—until just the other day when I saw one on the road that looked like it had been beaten up by Clint Eastwood.
It's a car marked with deep ties to its automotive cousins—Porsche (the first was designed by Mr. Porsche himself) and Audi. The new, new Beetle bears a much stronger resemblance to its relatives than the one that launched in the late 1990s and, as much as it pains me to say it, I like it.
The nose is flattened and elongated. It's still got those curvy hips, but they've beefed up the laughably slow engine with a turbocharged 200 HP go-getter. It won't exactly light up the night, but at least you won't feel like you're driving a clown car. The roof has been flattened out, and the interior has lost its cutesy-wootsy aesthetic in favor of a modern, tech-savvy commuter. Some people claim it looks more like the 1960s Beetle than the New Beetle, but to me, it seems like it's gone through the same evolution as Audi's TT—it started off all bubbly and round like a pre-teen, but it's finally grown out of its baby fat and developed some real lines.
It is still a Beetle. The good folks over at VW haven't abandoned 80 years of tradition. Only it feels more grown up. Gone are the googlie-eyed headlights and in comes the ability to pop the car in and out of Sport mode. Still handles through the turns, but you don't have to coast, you can gun it a little.
Had my wife been driving one of these when our first child was on the way, I might have been willing to consider selling my car instead of hers. I don't know that I'll run right down to my local VW dealer to buy one, but when my daughter is older and driving this vintage of Beetle, I won't be quite as embarrassed to have her drop me off at work in front of my friends.
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