For American kei car owners, the last few years have been tough. Many have been hit with surprise registration bans, and faced all kinds of struggles in dealing with hostile bureaucracies intent on demonizing their legally imported vehicles. For those in the state of Colorado, though, salvation is in sight, with a new law giving kei cars the legal status they deserve.

As reported by Car & Driver, Colorado governor Jared Polis signed a new bill, HB25-1281, into law on Friday. The new legislation officially recognizes the status of kei vehicles, defining them as motor vehicles under the Uniform Motor Vehicle Law and the Certificate of Title Act. Long story short, it says kei cars are cars and that they can be registered for use on the roads of Colorado.

It’s not an instant win—the bill will not go into effect until July 1, 2027. Regardless, it’s a positive result for kei owners, who now have a perfectly legal route to register and operate their vehicles on the roads of Colorado.

For kei enthusiasts in Colorado, it’s been a long road to acceptance. As we’ve reported previously, in 2024, kei owners had reported Colorado state DMV offices quietly denying emissions testing and refusing to register their vehicles without explanation, despite the lack of any official policy against kei vehicles. The state then attempted to firmly enforce this policy in the open, only to back down amidst heavy opposition from enthusiasts. Then the state continued its ban, but quietly.

Now, a resolution to this quagmire is finally on the horizon, with the status of kei cars properly enshrined in the law. The bill defines kei cars very specifically. To classify as a “kei vehicle,” it must have an internal combustion engine under 1.0-liter in displacement, or an electrical motor of 56 kW (75 hp) or less. It can also measure no longer than 140 inches, and no wider than 67 inches, with a minimum top speed requirement of 50 miles per hour. The legislation also mandates vehicles have enclosed passenger cabins and four or more tires in contact with the ground.

Under the bill, kei vehicles won’t have exactly the same status as regular USDM vehicles. Driving kei cars on limited-access highways or roads with limits posted higher than 55 miles per hour will be prohibited. Violating this will be a Class B traffic infraction in Colorado. These are considered minor infractions without jail time; typical penalties include fines from $15 to $100 plus surcharges, and no license points.

As for emissions testing, keis will be treated as a special case. Instead of the standard dynamometer emissions test, kei vehicles will be subject to a two-speed idle test, as the Colorado DMV typically requires for pre-1981 vehicles. The vehicle will still need to pass emissions requirements for the year of its manufacture. Denial of emissions testing was a hurdle that was keeping many kei cars off the roads. Now that proper procedure has been ratified, that won’t be a problem going forward.

There are also protections to stop prejudiced officials from causing issues for kei cars when it comes to inspections. Basically, the state isn’t allowed to deem your kei unroadworthy because of how it was built. As per the Colorado legislature:

The department of revenue, the Colorado state patrol, and the agents or contractors of these agencies may not require a vehicle to have an inspection because it is a kei vehicle or has the design or manufacturing parameters of a kei vehicle. And a kei vehicle may not be declared not roadworthy because of its design or manufacturing parameters.

There is also one further hurdle to clear, as noted in reporting by TFLCar. The act will take effect on July 1, 2027, except if a referendum petition is filed pursuant to the state constitution within 90 days of the final adjournment of the general assembly (which is slated for some time in May 2026).  In that case, the act won’t take effect unless approved at the November 2026 midterm election. It seems unlikely to happen, but it’s never wise to count your kei cars before they’ve hatched, so the saying goes.

State of Play

In welcoming the kei car, Colorado follows the fine example of states like North Carolina, Texas, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In virtually all cases, the hard work of enthusiasts has been key in getting these vehicles officially accepted by state officials. As our own Mercedes Streeter has explored previously, these cases have been fought against lobbyists like the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), which has long tried and succeeded in getting the imported vehicles classified as “off-road vehicles” to keep them off the streets.

Unfortunately, in many states, lobbying from the AAMVA has been remarkably effective at demonizing the kei car. A long list of states has responded by banning or restricting the use of these vehicles on public roads. Rhode Island, New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are all states that have come down hard against kei cars, but the fight is ongoing. Pro-kei enthusiasts already have a bill in play in Georgia, albeit with heavy restrictions, while enthusiasts in other states are continuing to organize to effect change.

The simple fact is that kei vehicles aren’t deserving of the hate they’ve received. They’re small and low-powered, but that has never been a valid reason to outright ban a vehicle from the roadways. Indeed, in virtually all cases, these vehicles were maligned for no good reason, as we’ve reported previously.

Wherever you live, it’s worth noting that laws regarding these vehicles remain patchy and varied across the United States. Just because the 25-year rule might get your old kei car in the country, it doesn’t mean that your home state will necessarily let you register it for the road. It’s worth looking into the current state of play before you set your heart (and bank account) on acquiring some diminutive Japanese metal. If you believe in the value of these beautiful little vehicles, though, you might consider putting your strength towards the efforts for kei liberty across the land.

Image credits: Daihatsu, Subaru, Mitsubishi, State of Colorado

Top graphic images: Daihatsu, depositphotos.com

The post Victory: Colorado Signs Law Making Kei Cars Legal… Eventually appeared first on The Autopian.

The US data center industry has warned that the Trump administration’s crackdown on renewable energy could slow its growth and undermine Washington’s goal to win the global artificial intelligence race.

Renewables have become a flashpoint since Donald Trump re-entered the White House, with his administration suspending clean energy developments on federal land, pausing federal loans and last month cancelling high-profile projects such as Equinor’s $5 billion Empire Wind site.

For tech companies struggling to secure reliable energy supplies to power and train AI, a clampdown on renewables could create power bottlenecks, drive up costs and push operators towards dirtier energy, experts said.

Simon Ninan, senior vice-president at Hitachi Vantara, which builds equipment and infrastructure for data centers, said the Trump administration’s “antagonistic approach” towards renewable energy could make it “impossible to satisfy the data growth that’s happening.”

“Strategically, the US could risk undermining its current pole position in the global AI race . . . China, on the other hand, has taken a proactive approach towards grid modernisation and efficient power distribution.”

Energy shortages could “result in cancellation or delays in data center build-outs or infrastructure upgrades,” he said.

The Trump administration has warned that losing the AI race to China is a bigger threat to the world than global warming and has advocated increasing the use of fossil fuels to power them. But experts warn it will be difficult to meet surging demand without adding a lot more renewable energy capacity, which is faster and cheaper to deploy than building gas power plants.

The assault on renewables has alarmed Democratic leaders in north-eastern states, which are relying on the expansion of wind energy to meet future electricity demand.

On Monday a coalition of Democratic attorneys-general from 17 states sued the Trump administration in an effort to block its attempt to end the development of wind energy.

Data centers are expected to add 83.7 gigawatt of energy demand by 2030, equivalent to adding a new state the size of Texas to the grid, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank. While many companies are investing in nuclear small modular reactor technologies, it may be years before they are operational.

“We’ve seen increased competition for green energy over the last couple of years,” said Nick Hertlein, a managing director at Stonepeak, an alternative investment firm specialising in infrastructure and real assets.

“If US AI development is a priority, [policymakers] need to find ways to accommodate the data center industry’s growth.”

While large-scale gas generation projects are being fast-tracked by major grid operators such as PJM, MISO and ERCOT, this may come at the expense of cheaper sources such as renewables. Gas turbine suppliers such as Siemens and GE Vernova have warned lead times can stretch to 2029 for larger models.

“If we can’t bring on new, lower-cost resources when demand is increasing, we’ll have to rely more and more on higher-cost resources,” said Rich Powell, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association.

“We just need to flood the zone with new electricity as quickly as we can.”

Although big participants in the technology industry may be able to lobby the administration to “loosen up” restrictions on new power sources, small to medium-sized players were in a “holding pattern” as they waited to see if permitting obstacles and tariffs on renewables equipment were lifted, said Ninan.

“On average, [operators] are most likely going to try to find ways of absorbing additional costs and going to dirtier sources,” he said.

Amazon, which is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, said carbon-free energy must remain an important part of the energy mix to meet surging demand for power, keep costs down and hit climate goals.

“Renewable energy can often be less expensive than alternatives because there’s no fuel to purchase. Some of the purchasing agreements we have signed historically were ‘no brainers’ because they reduced our power costs,” said Kevin Miller, vice-president of Global Data Centers at Amazon Web Services.

Efforts by state and local governments to stymie renewables could also hit the sector. In Texas—the third-largest US data center market after Virginia, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence—bills are being debated that increase regulation on solar and wind projects.

“We have a huge opportunity in front of us with these data centers,” said Doug Lewin, president of Stoic Energy. “Virginia can only take so many, and you can build faster here, but any of these bills passing would kill that in the crib.”

The renewables crackdown will make it harder for “hyperscale” data centers run by companies such as Equinix, Microsoft, Google and Meta to offset their emissions and invest in renewable energy sources.

“Demand [for renewables] has reached an all-time high,” said Christopher Wellise, sustainability vice-president at Equinix. “So when you couple that with the additional constraints, there could be some near to midterm challenges.”

Additional reporting Jamie Smyth.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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If all of the Autopian staff is looking forward to watching a PBS documentary, you can sort of assume that it won’t be some snoozefest about the Great Potato Famine or a Ken Burns thing on the smallpox pandemic. No, the six-part series we’re so stoked about concerns what is one of our favorite dead car brands: American Motors.

That’s right. Film producer and Autopian writer Joe Ligo quit his job to make The Last Independent Automaker, a six-part series out now that details the rise and fall of AMC, the forgotten challenger to the Big Three that employed hundreds of thousands of people and built millions of vehicles from 1954 to 1987. Spoiler alert: it won’t have a happy ending. Chrysler bought the company primarily for the Jeep brand and let the often-innovative non-SUV products rapidly die off.

For that reason, I’m revisiting one of the first things I did for the Autopian three years ago. I imagined what the American automotive landscape might have looked like if Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt in 1978. This scenario almost certainly would have played out if not for the U.S. government stepping in to guarantee loans for Chrysler (but thanks to the great Lee Iacocca’s work, the Fed ultimately never had to actually shell out one dime to Mopar until the Financiapocolyps of 2008). With that member of the Big 3 gone, it’s possible that American Motors could have filled the gap with their creative thinking to combat GM, Ford, and the rising imports.

I’ve been slowly going through the alternate universe AMC models that I showed in a fake 1987 full-line advertisement that I made back in 2022:

One car in this “ad” that I haven’t dug deeper into is the next generation of one of the most iconic AMCs from what proved to be the brand’s last decade: the Eagle. This one was highly deserving of a remake, since it was a car whose time really didn’t come until long after Chrysler had put the last American Motors dealership signs into landfills. Let’s make a worthy successor to what was arguably the first modern crossover.

The Hornet On Stilts

Take a look at the parking lot (or other people’s driveways, if you work from home), and what do you see? Not a lot of sedans, coupes, and minivans, I bet. No, I’m confident eighty percent of the vehicles you see are tall-but-car-like wagon-type things with all-wheel-drive. Those didn’t exist in American until the nineties, right?

Wrong. The eighties hadn’t even started yet when American Motors launched the Eagle in the fall of 1979. The brainchild of AMC’s chief design engineer Roy Lunn, the Eagle was to be a “line of four-wheel drive vehicles with the ride and handling conventions of a standard rear-wheel drive car” on a unibody platform.

Always strapped for cash, AMC used its by-then-decade-old Hornet compact as a basis for this groundbreaking car. Oddly enough, despite AMC’s experience with Jeeps, they contracted FF Developments in the UK (makers of the awesome, pioneering all wheel drive Jensen Interceptor FF) to build a prototype in 1977.

American Motors had predicted that consumers would want something with the mild capabilities of a utility vehicle with four-wheel drive and car-like comfort, and most importantly, fuel efficiency. Their gamble paid off when the second energy crisis hit in 1979 and sales of truck-based four-wheel drive machines (like AMC’s own Jeeps) tanked. Extra traction is nice, but if you never go to Moab, why suffer a 12-mile-per-gallon monster? The Eagle was just what the market needed.

The viscous-coupling center differential gave the Eagle on-road advantages that the only other car that might be considered a remote competitor (the much smaller Subaru part-time 4WD wagon) didn’t have. Audi’s Quattro was the only car offering something similar, but in 1980 it was only available as a high-dollar sports coupe (and not in NHTSA- or EPA-compliant specification yet, anyway). After testing an Eagle, Four Wheeler magazine deemed that it was “the beginning of a new generation of cars.” The author of this article likely had no idea how right they were.

AMC sold over 45,000 units in 1980, a great number for the always-struggling firm. You could get an Eagle in a wide variety of body styles from a landau roof-clad coupe to a traditional sedan or a “poor man’s UR Quattro” SX/4 sport hatchback.

AMC even gave us a funky Gremlin-based “Kammback” Eagle model, though the five-door wagon (based on the old Hornet Sportabout body) was by far the most popular model.

In its second model year, the Eagle upped the ante and added a feature you can’t even get on most modern SUVs: the ability to cut off the front drive wheels for better fuel economy and reduced driveline wear and tear. Why isn’t that available today? Note that with early models,  you had to stop the car to switch drive modes, hence the “two handed” safety switch.

The GM “Iron Duke” inline four joined the straight six as an available motor, but sales quickly began to drop. Despite the innovation, it was hard to cover up the fact that the Eagle was a 1969 car updated on a shoestring budget. Worse, AMC lacked the funds to give the Eagle the further development that would allow it to soar as high as it deserved to. Eventually, only the wagon body style was left in the lineup, and when the last 2,300 Eagles were sold as 1988 models, AMC no longer actually existed. These final cars were sold through the rebranded “Eagle” dealer network as “Eagle wagons” to avoid being called “Eagle Eagles.”

With hindsight, we know that the Eagle, like the International Harvester Scout, disappeared less than a decade before the public was ready to embrace them as mainstream products and could have been gangbusters successes. It’s painfully obvious that an all-new Eagle in the late eighties likely would have beaten the Subaru Outback series to market and taken the cash-cow crown that it earned. Here’s how that might have happened at an alternate-universe AMC.

Hell Freezes Over: The Eagles Return

If you weren’t alive at the time, it’s hard to understate how radical the Ford Taurus was when it appeared in 1986. Just the year before, the Blue Oval’s primary family sedan was a warmed-over Fox body Fairmont-body LTD that was as literally square-looking as it was metaphorically square-looking. If a flying saucer landed on my lawn in 1986, it would have seemed less surprising than observing a dramatically aerodynamic mid-sized sedan with the motor spinning the front wheels from the often-staid Ford Motor Company. What could have upstaged that?

Well, the boxy rides General Motors was fielding at the time certainly couldn’t do it (Celebrity, anyone?), and Chrysler’s stretched K-Cars didn’t even move the needle, but we’re talking about an alternate timeline when Mopar went bankrupt at the beginning of the eighties and no longer existed anyway. No, AMC would have been the other member of the Big 3. Ousted Ford leader and alternate universe American Motors president Lee Iacocca would have taken a look at the Taurus, shrugged a bit, and then said:

“We knew we could do better. That (Ford) team made a pretty good Audi impersonator, but they missed the optional feature which makes that car truly different. We did benchmark that (Audi) car and other Europeans but, as with the first Mustang, Hal (Sperlich) and I knew that we needed something more tailored to fit the American buyer.” – (Fictional) Lee Iacocca

As the (real world) ads said back in the day, AMC and Jeep “wrote the book on four-wheel drive”, and for 1987, they’d do it again. With the by-then seven-year-old Eagle, they’d given America the first mainstream all-wheel drive car, and now they were going to make this system even more gentrified into an everyday car with a “low profile” full-time four-wheel drive system. I imagine alternate-universe Lee continuing, “I firmly believe you’ll be hard pressed to find a car with only two-wheel drive a decade from now.”

Enter V-Drive

This time around, American Motors would forsake FF Developments and utilize a patented drivetrain that chassis giant Dana had created nearly twenty years before, in 1965.

With a typical four-wheel drive layout, a driveshaft extends off the front of a mid-mounted transfer case to a differential with drive axles coming off of it (which typically need to run beneath or even through the oil pan of the front-mounted motor). That’s now the original Eagle was; you can see that front axle and large front differential here on this ghost view of an original 1980 Eagle (which is why there was only space available for an inline 4 and 6, and you can’t do an LS swap to an Eagle even today).

Dana had a different solution. With Dana’s “V Drive” system, there were two driveshafts extending in a “V” shape from the transfer case to each front wheel. Apparently, the rights to this system were purchased and company called Vehicle Engineering and Manufacturing Company (VEMCO) used this layout to add aftermarket four-wheel drive to various Chevy and Ford vans from the late seventies up until at least some time in the eighties before ceasing to exist.

Why didn’t this system catch on? There must be a reason which some of you engineers and automotive historians can tell me, but I like it for the second-generation Eagle because it would accomplish exactly what I want to do by offering a lower ride height. Also, it’s a different, rather strange and unconventional solution so it’s right up AMC’s alley. The “V-Axle” transfer case would have been an engineering marvel that took Dana’s system a step further with a viscous coupling to distribute power. I do think that the “wheel gear units” could we dramatically reduced in size to eliminate a lot of weight there.

Now, with a V-Drive a wider V8 or V6 engine would be possible without the need to raise the whole damn car. Plus, removing the oil pan wouldn’t have to be part of a $3700 ordeal that the person typing this had to endure with his last all-wheel-drive BMW wagon.

“Old’ AMC needed to rely on the kindness of competitors to get a number of their motors, or rely on their ancient standby powerplants, but as a new member of the Chrysler-free Big 3 this new American Motors would be able to develop their own engines. Our new Eagle could offer the choice of either an aluminum single overhead cam Kenosha-built “Tech-6” V6 or “Tech-8” V8, both of them sharing the same architecture as “modular” motors.

Initially, the rear wheels would connect to a coil-sprung live axle, but the subframe system would be designed to accept an independent setup available after launch; all models would get rack and pinion steering and disc brakes at each corner (with ABS being available). Additionally, a lower-cost rear-drive version might be in the cards for later years. If you look at the 1987 model lineupvin the “ad” at the top of the post, you’ll see that I’ve offered a longer wheelbase “luxury” version of the Eagle as well called the Verona to compete primarily with the Taurus-based Lincoln Continental. There’s a bit of something for everyone here.

The Dude Can’t Hate Every One Of These Eagles

With a far bigger budget available than in 1980 and with a wide range of mid-sized American cars to compete with, it’s obvious that American Motors couldn’t be looking at a one-Eagle-fits-all approach with this new mid-sized model. There would be a sedan and station wagon/crossover, though coupes were just not worth the effort to tool up for by the end of the eighties (the slightly smaller Tempo-sized AMC Calabrone detailed a few weeks back would offer that option for buyers at a two door coupe and convertible).

Is that an L.L. Bean catalog I see in your mailbox? You wear those ugly duck boots to go to Whole Foods, not just canoeing to look at Great Blue Heron? Then the Eagle with the Trailrunner package would be your jam. Bigger tires, grey fender trim, and raised ride height mimic the ethos of the first Eagle, and the Trailrunner takes it a step further with a Jeep-like grille flanked by sealed beams and a surrounding shape that looks like a push bar (a void behind the license plate could hold a winch). The style is remarkably (and unintentionally) similar to the Grand Cherokee that came a few years later.

There’s a similar “push bar” on the rear bumper as well to complete the subtle aggressive look. In silhouette it’s very similar to the outgoing Eagle model but much closer in style to the concurrent Taurus/Sable wagon competitor. Of course, you’d never take that Ford wagon where this could go.

What if the tough look of the Trailrunner version isn’t for you? Indeed, to fight the likes of a Taurus we’d need to offer a less rough ‘n ready lower-slung sedan and wagon version for those that just want their all-wheel-drive without any pretentions of flannel shirt outdoorsiness. If you aren’t plaid-clad Colorado Mountain Man ready to hit the Kebler Pass, then you’ll like the “street” version of the Eagle which would really take advantage of that “low profile” all-wheel drive system.

This “standard” sedan is shown below with your parents circa 1987 getting ready to head out onto Woodward after prime rib dinner at the (now-demolished) Fox and Hound Inn in Bloomfield Hills. They’ll drive back your home in Royal Oak, which means you, your brother and your homie Dave have exactly twenty minutes to get rid of the pot smoke and clean up all the mess you made while they were out. Hurry up!

The non-Trailrunner Eagle sits a little lower on slightly smaller wheels and tires, lacks the grey fender flares and has a much less aggressive front end with composite headlamps and a far more toned-down Jeep-style grille.

I did try an even more Renault-looking nearly grille-free “aero” nose but the pendulum was swinging too far away from where I wanted to go. I nixed the one below, but if AMC wanted something more Taurus-like for the mainstream versions this could have worked:

So are you a tough Trailrunner person or more of a suburbanite? Here’s an animation so that you to take your pick:

What you have now is something for Subaru people that need a larger car; a sort of anti-Quattro without sporting pretensions, though an Eagle X4 model with performance tires and that aforementioned independent rear suspension might be available later to offer a cut-rate Audi 5000 for enthusiasts. Again, something for everyone.

Get Inside The Eagles (Without Don Henley Suing You)

With the 1980 Eagle, American Motors did a reasonable enough job with making the outside of a car that premiered literally weeks after Woodstock in 1969 look contemporary, but the inside was really, really suffering. Even if you were sold on the all-weather concept and styling, one step inside and you’d be taken back in time by at least a decade.

Our new Eagle would take inspiration from the “grandstand-style” dash design of contemporary Renaults with a sweeping glare-reducing canopy over all the instruments and a set of high-mounted air vents to complement the lower outlets. While a column shift and bench seat would be on the options list, my guess is that most would choose the bucket seats and center console for the automatic transmission.

“Piano” type buttons for the climate control sit next to a large slider switch to engage four-wheel drive, with a button to lock the center differential below.  An illuminated schematic above these controls would show the drive mode (as well as other vehicle alerts such as washer fluid and bulbs burned out). Digital gauges and automatic temperature control are shown, but good old analog instruments and a less-elaborate manual climate control would be standard.

Look Out, Taurus: You’re Just A Car

Seriously, if you’re even a casual car enthusiast you need to watch the AMC documentary to know how much this little company offered to the automotive world. These “continuation” AMC models that I’ve sketched up over the last three years are proof that directionally this Kenosha firm (and their Renault parent) knew which way that the industry was headed. Tragically, they were too early to the market, and too late to change their fate.

This Eagle II concept is so similar to the original 1980 Eagle we had, but the subtle modernization I did could have turned it a Subaru Legacy Outback with V8 power, or an Audi Allroad that wouldn’t self-destruct, a decade or more sooner than those cars debuted. It’s a shame that Chrysler reaped the rewards of the boom in Jeep popularity within months after AMC disappeared.

Am I saying that I wish that the government hadn’t bailed out Chrysler (for the first time) in 1979? What about Vipers, GLHs, Challengers and Prowlers? It’s true that we’d have missed out on quite a bit if they had gone into the mist, though today most Mopar cars and even entire brands have sadly disappeared anyway.

No, if I had to make the choice of which reality I would have wanted for the Big 3 nearly fifty years ago, I know without hesitation which direction I’d go.

1987 AMC Eagle Trailrunner Wagon Specs

Base Price: $14,100
As Shown: $17,850
Major Standard Features:
All Wheel Drive
Air Conditioning
AM/FM Stereo Cassette with four speakers
Options Shown on Photo Car:
Metallic Sapphire Blue Paint Finish
Trailrunner Package (upgraded aluminum wheels, tires, front and rear fascias, fender trim)
Convenience Package (power windows, locks, and seats plus cruise control)
Technology package (automatic climate control, digital instruments with trip computer)
Leather seating surfaces
Premium Sound with CD player and ten speakers (coaxials in doors and rear cargo area)

Drivetrain:
192HP 4875cc SOHC V8, electronic fuel injection (3467cc SOHC V6 standard)
4 speed automatic transmission, all-wheel drive (optional locking center differential)

Chassis:
Double wishbone front suspension, coil springs
Live axle rear suspension, coil springs
4 wheel disc brakes
Rack and pinion steering

The post This Is The Amazing Machine The AMC Eagle Could Have Become Had AMC Survived appeared first on The Autopian.

I love Beetles. I always have. I’ve mostly just accepted this as a sort of natural law, like how things tend to fall downward or how there are 93 penises on the Bayeux Tapestry. But then I found that our very own gothy British designer Adrian had penned a poison letter announcing his revulsion at the humble little car, liberally seasoned with his usual vitriol, fresh from the bottle. This, of course, shocked me, in the same way that finding one more penis in the Bayeux Tapestry would. I realized that while everyone here at the Autopian is allowed their own automotive opinions, no matter how blighted or misguided, I cannot just let Adrian’s anti-Beetle missive go unanswered. So I’m writing this defense of the Beetle because these cars mean so much to me, and, more importantly, I think the Beetle has more than earned such a defense.

If I’m honest, though, the Beetle doesn’t need me to defend it. It’s the most-produced single car model ever made, with 21.5 million examples built between an absurdly long production run lasting from 1938 to 2003. The Beetle was built in Germany and Brazil and Mexico and Australia and South Africa and Nigeria and Ireland and some other places I’m probably forgetting. The Beetle put people into cars in places and circumstances that no other car would have been able to accommodate, and in the process became arguably the world’s most readily-identifiable car ever. Adrian is free to dislike the Beetle, but the truth is the Beetle doesn’t mind, because the Beetle has too many ardent fans in too many places, and all those people that love this noisy little insect aren’t going to be swayed by someone grousing on the internet, even when that grousing is as well-written as Adrian’s is.

The Beetle isn’t daunted by criticisms. It’s heard most of these complaints for decades, and most of them aren’t really wrong, when it comes down to it. The Beetle is a strange little car, noisy and slow and primitive, milking a design from the age of Zeppelins well into the age of the Internet. But none of those things matter, even the slightest. The Beetle’s flaws and its charms blur together into a beautiful haze, every failing just adding to the considerable character of the car. There really is no more secure car than the Beetle, and I don’t mean that in the safety sense, because, by modern standards, an old air-cooled Beetle is definitely not safe. I mean that in the sense of being the opposite of something that is insecure, because the Beetle has nothing to prove. It has been an underdog from day one, and triumphed, in its own quiet and noisy way, ever since.

The Beetle probably shouldn’t be as much of a triumph as it was, given its origins. Really, it couldn’t have a worse origin story, being summoned into being by one of history’s worst monsters, Adolf Hitler. Hitler didn’t design the Beetle or anything like that, but he demanded a car for the people, arguably one of the only non-terrible ideas he had, and then Ferdinand Porsche consolidated all of the various ideas being played with around Europe at that time of a new kind of small car, one with a rear engine and a streamlined shape, and eventually the KdF-Wagen (Strength-through-Joy car) was born.

The KdF wouldn’t be built for civilian use during the war; instead the Beetle would be adapted to wartime duty, where the first hints of this machine’s incredible versatility would be revealed, as it formed the basis of Germany’s wartime light cars like the Kübelwagen and the amphibious Schwimmwagen.

As a Jew who loves Beetles, you might think the origins of this car would dissuade me from wanting to have anything to do with them, but I think the contrary is true. Think about it: what would piss off Hitler’s ghost more than knowing that Jews like me are out there driving and enjoying his precious KdF-wagens? He’d be livid, soaking his jodhpurs in rage-urine and shrieking NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN while I buzz past him in my yellow Beetle on the way to go to town on some whitefish salad on a bialy, flipping that dead loser the bird as I go by.

The Beetle earned every bit of its success. The reason foreign cars never quite made it in America prior to the Beetle was because, frankly, they weren’t up to the challenge. Driving in America is a very different prospect than driving in Europe. The distances demanded by America would put you into one of several oceans should you attempt a similar drive in Europe. Most European cars of the ’50s weren’t robust enough to go on 12-hour highway-speed road trips. But the Beetle was specifically designed with an under-stressed engine with a short throw and low piston speed; its top speed wasn’t terribly high, but it was the same as its cruising speed, which meant it could haul down long American highways at decent highway speeds all day long, and for a tiny cheap car from the Old Country, this was an achievement.

Plus, when Volkswagen came to America, they had the foresight to set up an incredibly robust dealer network, and stocked those dealers with enough parts to build them, not just repair them. The car was designed to be easy to service from the get-go, and it was.

Engines dropped out of the bottom of the car after taking out four bolts, and some hoses and wires. Fenders could be replaced with 10 bolts. Bumpers were mounted far from the body to take damage before the body did, and were almost be treated as consumables, cheap and easy to replace. This was a car that was forgiving of the human condition and all the unpredictability of the world, and worked with you when things got rough, reacting well to whatever scrambling you could do to keep it going.

The Beetle was the original anti-status car. It was truly classless, meaning that it transcended social strata, being something that your broke friend could drive or a movie star like Paul Newman.

It didn’t change its sorta Art Deco-inspired design that was finalized before America even entered WWII, because why should it? The design worked. Let the Big Three radically redesign their chrome-slathered land barges every year. Does it make those cars better to own or use? Not really. The Beetle was incrementally improved constantly, and never changed for the sake of change. That’s why it became a sort of unofficial universal unit of measurement – it was a constant through time and space, seen and understood by people all over the world.

The Beetle is often thought of as a slow car, but that’s not entirely a fair assessment. In the right contexts, the Beetle proved to be a formidable racer. It was used for rally racing, drag racing, and, when adapted to use some genuinely bonkers rocket engines from Turbonique, could be astoundingly fast:

But where the Beetle really shone in competition was off-road. This humble little everyday commuter car, a car designed to be cheap, basic transportation for people, somehow managed to also be an incredibly capable off-road racer, tackling some of the hardest races in the world like the Baja 1000. There’s still a whole class of off-road racing, Class 11, that is basically stock Beetles, and it’s still going today, decades after Beetles have been common on the roads.

What other economy car can claim something like this? Whole categories of racing based on them? That doesn’t happen. Except for the Beetle. I got to drive a Class 11 car once, and it was an absolute thrill:

And, of course, when it comes to competition chops, let’s not forget that without the Beetle, there would be no Porsche 356, which was essentially an improved Beetle, and then no Porsche 911, and no Porsche as we know it at all, ever.

The Beetle’s ubiquity and unique chassis design that allowed the entire body to be easily removed also birthed the whole kit car industry, and most famously in that category (and fitting in with the discussion of the Beetle’s off-road racing successes) gave the world the Meyers Manx (and all its copycats).

How many other cars have birthed entirely new subsets of the automotive industry? Kit cars were not even remotely as accessible or popular until easy-to-find, adapt, maintain, drive, and register Beetles gave up their chassis to become dune buggies or MG TD look-alikes or crazy wedge-shaped sports cars or sleek little vans or whatever.

Oh! And I just remembered something else! The damn things floated! Without any modifications, Beetles were built so well and their bodies were so air-tight that you could drive them right into a lake or whatever and the car would float, at least for a while. VW even touted this in their ads:

With a little modification, you could get it to float indefinitely, and in some really difficult circumstances, like the open ocean:

Again, what other car, regardless of price or status or anything, could do that?

The Volkswagen Beetle really wasn’t like any other mass-produced car before it, and, when I was growing up, I could tell the Beetle was different, and that absolutely appealed to me. There were all the other cars around me, and then there were Beetles. The Beetles looked different, sounded different, smelled different, and, as I knew from riding around in my dad’s red ’68, felt different to ride in. And I loved that.

Beetles were my gateway drug into interesting cars; it was because the Beetle did everything so differently that I started to become more and more interested in cars in general and soon would devour every book or magazine or placemat that could tell me anything about a car I didn’t know about before. The Beetle is fascinating because for all of its success, it didn’t really set a template for what was to come, like cars like the transverse-engined FWD Mini did. The Beetle was a strange survivor of long-gone way of thinking, a refugee from a future that never happened, a future of rear-engined streamlined cars and airships and skyscrapers connected with skyways and all sorts of other utopian visions of the 1930s.

The Beetle was the one bit of those daydreams that made the jump into reality, and once here, it flourished, even though it was mostly alone. Still, the world embraced this charming, friendly little machine, and gave it a home on its roads and in its culture.

And we can’t ignore the Beetle’s cultural impact; the whole reason Disney cast a Volkswagen as a sentient race car in The Love Bug was because of all the cars that were being considered, which were parked in a Disney parking lot, the Beetle was the only one that people felt the urge to pet, like they would an animal. There is something about the Beetle’s design that is disarming and appealing, a plucky sort of eagerness that tugs at something deep inside us, making us feel warmth and affection for this collection of bent sheet metal, rubber, and glass.

Has any other car appeared on more kid’s clothes or sheets or as toys than the Beetle? I don’t think so. Is there any other car as instantly recognizable as the Beetle? Perhaps the original Jeep, but that’s about it, really. The Beetle transcends the automotive world, and is part of the overall human world, familiar to people who otherwise couldn’t tell a Corvette from a Chevette.

I’m terribly fond of Adrian and all his earnest British crankiness, but he is woefully misguided here. The Volkswagen Beetle is one of the truly great cars of the world, ever, an astoundingly flexible and usable transportation tool for so very many people, in so many places. A tool that came from the worst possible origins and proved itself to be a rugged and willing partner in life, a strangely charming and appealing artifact, one of those works of human hands that transcends everything it was originally intended to be, becoming a marvel of ingenuity and an object of affection.

I’ll always love the Volkswagen Beetle, openly and unashamedly, fully aware of all its many flaws and still smitten, hopelessly and happily.

The post Why I Love The VW Beetle – A Rebuttal appeared first on The Autopian.

I hate Beetles. That felt so good, I’m going to say it again. Beetles. I hate them. There. That was so cathartic I need a cigarette. Look, I can’t help being the pantomime villain around here. It’s why The Autopian hired me. Every great American cultural enterprise needs an evil mustache-twirling Brit chewing the literary scenery to elevate it above the horde, and it’s the role I was born to play.

Disliking Beetles (as opposed to The Beatles, whom I also hate) feels like an indefensible stance, unlike say, hating celery or the New England Patriots. Both are completely reasonable positions, and should you put them to a normal person, they’ll shrug their shoulders, agree with you, and get on with the rest of their day. Hating the single best-selling model of car ever made with legions of adoring fans speaks to a raging schism at the very core of my being. VW sold twenty-one and a half million of the bloody things, so that’s a lot of happy Beetle owners versus me. Maybe I’m a fundamentally broken person with a penchant for impossible odds.

My intense loathing for them is irrational, the purest kind of hatred. It just exists without explanation. It insists upon itself. Hating Beetles reminds me of being eight years old and being filled with the overwhelming urge to punch that pathetic kid in school who constantly forgot his gym kit and kept wetting himself. Picking on the Beetle is a new low, even for me. I started therapy recently, so let’s indulge in some here and see if we can figure out why I’m feeling these unfamiliar human emotions.

I Just Can’t Find Anything Redeeming About Them

Before we begin, I want to explain how I approach this tawdry business of writing about cars and car design. I try to cast out my own preconceptions and biases and figure out what’s important to the person who might be buying a particular car. It’s more nuanced than just saying a car is good or bad. There are no truly bad cars anymore. What’s important is whether a car works for its intended purpose and how it might fit into your life. When I’m wearing my car designer Fedora, I should be able to parse out the form and content of a car and place it in historical context. Why does this car exist in the form that it does? What circumstances led to its creation? What were the economic, engineering, or societal factors that influenced its final design? What I’m saying is I should be able to remove my visceral dislike of the ass engined Nazi staff car and dispassionately find something about it I can champion. Or at least construct into a two-thousand-word argument I can get paid for. But when it comes to the Beetle, I just can’t. It’s beyond my dubious talent as a writer and outside my makeup as a human being to say anything good about them without metaphorically crossing my fingers behind my back. I can’t do it.

The first memories I have of the crappy little things are from when I was young. My squishy and underdeveloped child brain couldn’t understand why Beetles didn’t look like any other car on the road. I knew they were called Volkswagens because I could read the badges on the back, and in my paltry collection of diecasts was a miniature souped-up version – number 31 in the Matchbox 1-75 range toy car fans. Pushing it around the seventies brown carpet the usual brum brum little car noises I made weren’t right because Beetles made an annoying ring-a-ding sound from their assholes that sounded like nothing else on the road. In my tiny head, Beetles were simply wrong at being a car. In time-honored working-class east London fashion, my bastard stepfather was a part-time kerbside cowboy mechanic for friends. One of his regular customers owned an orange Beetle 1303S. Apparently this was some sort of special and rare Beetle, which sounds like an oxymoron if ever I typed one. All I knew was it kept him in cash-in-hand work because it was always breaking down, and one night it caught fire. It’s possible he was as bad a mechanic as he was a father.

Clearly I’m transposing the trauma of my childhood onto the poor Beetle, and that’s why I can’t stand them. Except I don’t believe for one second that’s the case. It was all a very long time ago, and those scars , while still visible, have mostly healed over. But my passionate loathing for Beetles continues to rage unabated. My mate Beer Boy is big into drag racing. He’s always sending me pictures of Volkswagens that have gone all manner of wild transformation in the name of getting down the quarter mile as fast as possible, and no amount of alcohol injection or candy flake paint is going to change the fact that my reaction to these cars is that they are extremely stupid. He reminisced about owning a 400bhp Beetle that regularly caught other cars unawares. My reply to that was Beetles are so slow it takes 400bhp to make one move like a 200bhp car. They’re performance sucking vortex – gas goes in and that stupid spanners in a tumble dryer engine note is the only thing that comes out.

Man Of The People Doesn’t Like People’s Car

Putting a Beetle next to other drag machines is unfair. Let’s compare it to its contemporaries, the other classic post-war people’s cars. Despite all the grasping pretention and high-minded hot air I expel here I am very much homo populi. When the collapse comes, I’ll be joining my brothers and sisters around the brazier as we attempt to barbecue the last non-radioactive rat, not sitting in an ivory spaceship awaiting lift off to Mars. People’s cars are very close to my heart. Minis have a classless, bulldog puppy charm I’m slowly warming to. In true pretentious wanker fashion I can see myself writing a travelogue about waxing across the dunes of North Africa in a Renault 4. Although it’s a close run thing, the Fiat 500 is more appealing to me than Sophia Loren tumbling out of the kitchen with a plate of spaghetti, although admittedly, as classic transport, their total lack of speed renders them suitable only for local coffee runs.

Although notionally post-war cars, both the Beetle and the Citroen 2CV crucially had their engineering laid out pre-war. They both had compact space-saving torsion bar suspension, air-cooled boxer engines on the driven axle, and a platform chassis that facilitated the bolting on of alternate bodies. Like the Beetle, the 2CV also enjoyed an extended, decades-long production run – it didn’t leave the UK market until 1990. The 2CV is a French Beetle built the right way around. They’re a bit lentil soup and too much this week’s auto-journo fad for me, but I don’t viscerally despise 2CVs in the same way I do la Coccinelle. Let me put it this way – if you said you had a 2CV outside, I’d want a go. You’d have to force me into the driver’s seat of a Beetle at gunpoint – and it isn’t because the 2CV is French and the VW is German. Give me the choice of anywhere to live in Europe, and Germany would be top of the list. I would say Norway because it’s stunning and I have dear friends there, but have you seen what it costs to get a drink in Oslo? I’d be broke before I was plastered. Nope, it’s the land of currywurst, breakfast beer, unrestricted autobahns, and a thriving goth scene for me.

So it’s not nostalgia, the Beetle’s proletarian nature or its nationality that’s repelling me from them, nor the fact that they are epically slow. Despite my disparagement, the Beetle was designed around a clear set of Modernist design ideas. Although initially conceived by the world’s worst art school failure, it was designed by one of the greatest automotive minds of the time, Ferdinand Porsche. He had help forming the Beetle’s distinctive shape from aerodynamicist Paul Jaray and more than a little influence from Tatra, and, really, a whole set of other automotive engineers of the time. The ethos behind its creation was the ‘motorization of the German people’. According to ‘Fifty Cars That Changed The World’:

“Nevertheless, the Beetle was conceived, all at once, as a single integrated engineering solution with no ‘ad hoc’ solutions or ‘legacy’ components from earlier models. The body structure was superb, rigid, watertight and corrosion-resistant, and the quality of the mechanical parts was unusually high for a popular car. Germany’s preeminence in electromechanical engineering also meant that the electrical equipment (starter motor, ignition equipment and dynamo), often the Achilles’ heel of most budget cars at the time, was excellent, so a Beetle always started on cold, damp mornings. The VW’s success was a triumph of good engineering over questionable chassis design.”

Nobody Wanted To Build It

When the dust settled after the war most manufacturers had to resort to what they had been selling back in 1939. So in 1946 when the Beetle appeared it did have some advantages over the pre-war crocks everybody else was peddling. At the end of hostilities Wolfsburg came under British control and the British government tried to get domestic manufacturers interested in the weird device by giving away the car and the factory for nothing. Even at that bargain price, according to The Guardian Lord Rootes dismissed the Beetle for being too ugly and too noisy. I know how he felt. Eventually the British gave up trying to fob VW off and dumped it in the hands of Heinz Nordhoff, an ex-Opel director.

By the time the Fiat 600 and Mini appeared in 1955 and 1959 respectively the Beetle, in Europe at least, was starting to look pathetically out of date. But in the United States it became a protest vehicle driven by the sort of people who use plants for both eating and bathing. The Beetle’s simple ass-backwards engineering and homespun thriftiness was turned into a virtue against the conspicuously consumptive boats Harley Earl was designing. It achieved this counter-cultural sleight of hand with the help of a genuinely groundbreaking advertising campaign. Now I’m a sucker for a good advert and consider the best work to be high art as much as the next art school skin chimney but even those Doyle Dane Bernbach spots are not winning me over.

Over sixty-five years of production, VW did incrementally improve the car, introducing minor updates every year – far more than Citroen did with the 2CV or BMC et al did with the Mini. But the Volkswagen was conceptually still the same little obstreperous motorized saucepan lid in 2003 that it was in 1938. If longevity was a characteristic to be celebrated I laid out a particularly long turd down the U-bend this morning and I don’t see that appearing on t-shirts, having models made of it or celebratory parties being thrown with thousands of unwashed trust fund radicals in attendance. A Beetle is all the most miserable and undesirable things you don’t want in a car: they’re slow. They’re heroically ugly. They’re noisy. They have terrible rear suspension. The essentially similar 2CV at least has joie de vivre about it, a sense of Gallic fun epitomized by being on the door handles in a corner at 20 mph. Beetles are just sad sacks of spartan dourness – flaccid body work flopping drooping towards the tarmac and a generally pathetic demeanor, woefully coalesced into a hunchback of concentrated crapiness. There’s not one decent quality in a Beetle that I couldn’t get in another, more preferable car.

Twenty-one point five million Beetles. Think of all the congestion that could be eased and human hearing saved by destroying them all. The roads would be freer, quieter, and the world a much more beautiful place. Just leave me one chassis please, so when time and resources allow, I can build a goth Meyers Manx beach buggy. It doesn’t matter what year. They’re all the same damn car.

The post Why I Hate The VW Beetle – The Most Popular Car Ever Made appeared first on The Autopian.