VW

Saying Goodbye is Hard to Do, But the Beetle Final Edition Makes it a Little Easier

Despite sharing a love of costumes, sweets, and the end of October, Halloween and the Day of the Dead are remarkably different in their treatment of death.Whereas Americans laugh in the face of death, taunting it and diminishing its power with horror movies and fierce invasions of death's time (the night), the Mexican celebration is an attempt to barter with death, to please the dead with offerings and food. That's what those orange marigolds are for (to lead the dead to food, booze, and gifts). These are left out for the dead to feast on for a week or so, in which time no one is allowed to touch the treats as they too start to decompose and move closer to death. If these differences have to do with each culture's wider attitudes toward life and death I can not say, but they do, to a certain extent, reflect Mexico's relationship to the Beetle.Already the third "Final Edition" Beetle that VW's Puebla plant has produced (along with one in 2003 and another 2010), it's safe to say that Volkswagen of Mexico has been negotiating the death of the Beetle, while America laughed in death's face it , then reanimating its corpse.In fact, since the plant first opened in the mid-60s, it has never stopped producing Beetles. When Germany and then other nations stopped producing the air-cooled Beetle, Mexico kept right on going. Even after Brazil stopped, then started again in the '90s, then stopped a few years later, Mexico kept right on going, keeping death waiting like Emily Dickinson until 2003, six years after Puebla started producing the watercooler "New Beetle."Well after the rest of the world gave up on the Type 1, letting it push up daisies, Mexico led it onto the streets with marigolds. Now, though, after a pair of decreasingly successful follow-ups, it may finally be time to stop bartering with death and move on to acceptance. This Final Edition will be well and truly be for the Beetle, making 2020 the first year since 1946 that nothing known as a Beetle will leave any VW factory anywhere in the world. And while you might argue that the front-engined, water-cooled, Golf-based "Beetle" shares nothing in common with the rear-engined, air-cooled, Standard Superior-inspired Type 1, there's something sad about seeing the name die out . And after all, Tsar Nickolas, the inept diarist who lost an empire shared very little in common with his great-great- ... -great-grandpa Ivan the Terrible, and yet the end of the line still matters to us.

Like the Romanov line, the end of the Beetle is noteworthy because of its historical significance. Volkswagen is at crossroads, trying to get usher in the future and forget the recent past. It's tempting to see the Beetle as a casualty to this cause. After all, the line on which it's made is shared with VW's new North American sales darling, the Tiguan. Its disappearance from that line will not only free up production space for the Tiguan but will also speed up the line, allowing Puebla to produce them faster, too. Its mantle the retro-chic reminder of the VW that was also usurped, though, only the Tiguan alone can not be blamed.The all-electric I.D. Buzz is currently doing the auto show circuit, keeping the flat four torch alive-even though it will not be flat-four-powered or even air-cooled. It will be of the Beetle's job of mixing the new with the old, though, keeping our anxieties about the future at bay through the opiate nostalgia. The dying baby boomer population and plan to sell it until 2025 do make us wonder, though whether it will be any more successful than the "New" and then not "New" Beetle were.The New Beetle has never been so successful, but it has been a very good trade for a while, selling a reasonably solid 80,000 / year units at its height. Riding a wave of nostalgia and retro design (MINI, SSR, PT Cruiser, T-Bird, etc.) the Beetle was a cutesy nod to the amusingly advertised car of the counterculture. Really, though, it was always a novelty accused of being too feminine for an era of ever-aggressive design. In 2010, it was replaced by the less cutesy, but also less notable Beetle. Its sales flagged even more than the "New Beetle's," recording only a few hundred sales a month lately.

Offered in two special colors (blue and beige) and in a few other boring colors (varying shades of black, gray, and white), the design and color scheme are a nod to the final edition of the Mexican air-cooled Beetle in 2003 Its wheels, too, are meant to elicit that car, with rims whose style apes the moon dish hubcaps and white walls of the past. It also comes with a few special touches inside, a "Beetle" insert in the lower spoke of the steering wheel, the beige dash on some blue cars, diamond-stiched two-tone seats, and more. And even the options, chosen for value, to keep the price low, have been chosen with a view to the original Beetle's proletarian roots.It all comes together well. The Beetle can not hide its age (the old, tiny, Composition Media screen is a stark reminder of how much progress VW has made on its infotainment systems), but this remains a perfectly acceptable offering for anyone interested in a car with a little style, verve, and build quality-this is a tangent, but VW let us ride along for a new car test run on its Puebla rough road course and then we drove it on Puebla's nearly indiscernibly better roads and the Beetle reveals the racist lie at the heart of complaints of inferior build quality from the Mexican plant.The Beetle, as ever, is rock solid, well decorated, and undeniably different to look at. As with the 2018 model, the Budak cycle 1.8-liter engine in combination with its 8-speed auto trades eagerness (174 hp) for fuel economy. The lead-follow, caravan nature of our drive meant closely following the lead car and this revealed how to sluggish the Beetle can be. When you stab the throttle, the transmission has to figure out which gear it would like to be in, shift it into it, and wind up the supposedly constantly torquey engine before you actually accelerate. It's slightly less annoying on a normal drive, but when responsiveness is of the essence, it makes for a jerky drive.

The collectible I doubt this shall be. The third-gen Beetle may look like the Type 1, but it shares none of its popularity nor its cultural significance. In all material ways, it's essentially a 2018 Beetle (the Final Edition comes in either SE trim starting at: SE, $ 23,940; SEL, $ 26,890; SE convertible, $ 28,190; SEL convertible, $ 30,890), but for a char in design and pluck, this is a well-gauged edition. You could buy a regular Beetle and get most of the same stuff, but why would not you buy this historical model that VW's product planners have spent time and effort making nicer?Like the Romanov line, it's probably time for the Beetle to end. It's a throwback to an older team whose excesses were seductive but ultimately predicted on death and discomfort. And while this marks the end of the line, literally for the Beetle, like the new "The Romanoffs" TV show, I suspect that our cultural fascination with that past will live on (unlike that show, though, it does not suck ). And if you're a big Beetle fan, the "New Beetle" proves that Wolfsburg is willing to revive the Beetle after years away, so there may be some solace there.

But I'm also glad that VW of Mexico has worked so hard to keep the flame burning. As a proud owner of the "New Beetle" I can say that despite being charming as the Type 1, it was nevertheless a fine one that works just as hard as the original Beetle and has proven resistant to the idea of ​​rolling over. The second and third generation Beetles may have been opiates, using nostalgia to see us through some rough years of car design, but that does not make them bad.As with the Day of the Dead, Puebla negotiated the death of the Beetle, keeping its memory alive and walking us to this point where we can accept its death. The thing that no one ever mentions about going out with a bang instead of a whimper, is that bangs really hurt.

Sebastian Bell