Volkswagen will kill the Beetle, squashes plans for a successor
motorauthority.com
motorauthority.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)"
Another bad example for a spruced up retro car is the Mini.
It's as if they took the old Mini and fed it too much anabolic steroids (oh yeah, and jacked up the price three-fold).
The only half way acceptable retro car is the Fiat 500.
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.
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.
EDIT: Changed Mini to Minibus.
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!
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
https://s.aolcdn.com/commerce/autodata/images/USC70NIC161C02...
or this:
http://www.chevrolet.com/content/dam/chevrolet/na/us/english...
or this:
https://www.futureford.com/assets/stock/colormatched/white/6...
VW is not going the way of Nokia.
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.
Good riddance.
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?
WP was the better bet for Nokia, but they didn’t have any good choices at that point.
Turns out there is a market for a well built phone that gets security and Android updates in a rapid manner!
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/multivan....