Boxwish Blog

Auto of the week: 1998 Volkswagen New Beetle

Posted by Team Boxwish on 02 September 2008 at 11.16AM

To you and me the Volkswagen New Beetle looks harmless enough. Sure, debate still rages as to whether it is an improvement on the original, but such talk is not enough to spark violence. Unless you go by the name Tyler Durden. As the fight-loving soap-seller, Brad Pitt’s alter-ego and his side-kick chum, the Narrator (as played by Edward Norton) take a serious dislike to the New Beetle and with baseball bats in hand show just how much they hate it in Fight Club. It’s definitely not a moment for car lovers.

“Brad [Pitt] and I figured out we had a mutual loathing of the new Volkswagen Beetles,’’ explains Norton on how the scene came about. ’’So we managed to work in a scene where we whack one with a baseball bat. We’re saying that it’s a perfect example of the baby boomer generation marketing its youth culture to us as if our happiness is going to come by buying the symbol of their own youth movement. It’s appalling to me.” It is said to have become less appalling to Pitt since, who has sought to curry favour with Volkswagen by proclaiming the car “a great reworking of a classic design.”

Away from the principles and ideals of the Fight Club world, the New Beetle has become a popular sight. Based on the Volkswagen Golf Mk4, it has maintained many design features of the original such as separate wings, sloped headlights and rounded tail lights while being an essentially modern vehicle. The big change comes with the transference of the engine from the rear into the front, yet it was so well-received by critics and the buying public alike on its launch back in 1998 that Volkswagen have since introduced a convertible model. Take that Tyler Durden!