The Summer of Love, 1967: Hippies, Janis Joplin, The Mamas & The Papas, Haight-Ashbury, flower power, hallucinogens, and the VW Beetle. Lots and lots of VW Beetles. Cheap to buy, stingy on gas, and virtually indestructible, the Beetle proved the quintessential counter-culture car of the American youth movement.
Three decades later, many of those former long-hairs are running the nation's commerce and judicial systems, planning leveraged-buyout takeovers on Wall Street, and trumpeting conservative morals to today's children who listen to "that horrible" rap music.
Ironically, as well, the Beetle is back. But this time, it's being purchased (in droves, check any VW dealer's waiting list) by everyone from college students to corporate CEOs. Obviously, America's love affair with the huggable Bug is stronger than ever.
The release of Volkswagen's New Beetle has unquestionably ushered in a new wave of Beetlemania. The look is unmistakable in its nostalgic appeal. Yet, well beyond its retro inspiration, this car's styling is an innovative mix of past, present, and future, melding its classic shape with a unique new-millennium influence, along with the current realities of 5-mph bumpers and side airbags. Yet, most significant of all, the New Beetle is much more than just a clever design. This VW delivers throughout. It's genuinely fun to drive. It has segment-leading safety features, as well as a surprisingly roomy interior for its size class. Plus, with a base price of under $16,000 that includes a long list of standards more typical of higher-cost models, it's an outstanding value. For all these reasons and more, we're proud to name the Volkswagen New Beetle as Motor Trend's '99 Import Car of the Year.
As always, the fight for the Import Car of the Year award was a tough one. Motor Trend's editorial staff evaluated every all-new or significantly changed '99 model that would be sale by Jan. 1, 1999, and be EPA-classified as import vehicles. As you'll read in our "Significant Others" sidebar, this year's group of contenders totaled 15 and included a full spectrum of vehicles: pure sports cars, luxury sport sedans, mainstream family sedans, sporty coupes, and economy cars. The competition was intense, and all went through a thorough testing and evaluation process under the scrutiny of our entire editorial staff. In the end, VW's New Beetle rose to the top of the list as the most significant import car of '99. Let this begin the Summer of Bug.
The Birth Of "The Look"Months ago, when one of our editors wrote that the New Beetle was, "Perhaps the most successful transformation from concept car to production vehicle ever," he paid tribute to a process that's spanned the last six years. While Volkswagen is still producing the original Type 1 Beetle at the rate of 400 a day in Puebla, Mexico, the original "people's car," has long since faded into America's collective nostalgia while taking on a cult-like status. In 1993, J. Carrol Mays (now Ford's head of styling) and Freeman Thomas, of VW's U.S. Design Centre in Simi Valley, California, were developing a styling theme for a experimental hybrid-powered car due to be introduced at Detroit's North American International Auto Show that following January. What evolved was the Concept 1, a look that blended that of the Beetle with a thoroughly modern attitude.
The design was an instant hit. It fired the imagination of the public, the media, and the VW dealer body. And within a year, Volkswagen had confirmed it would put the Concept study into production despite the many technical challenges the show car's shape presented.