Here's Why Volkswagen Sold Over 21 Million Beetles | Beetle Diaries Ep. 9

[Music] this is a 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle and today we're gonna take you through all its different quirks and features we borrowed this car from Roman because we're here at our offices in Boulder Colorado Mike what are you doing we're doing a Doug video we're not Doug though no but he hasn't done the beetle yet so we got to beat him to the punch oh right so as I was saying we're gonna take you through all of its different quirks and features and then we're gonna take it for a drive and then we're gonna give it a TfL rating we're gonna rate it on buy it lease it rent it or forget it [Music] in a word the Beatles styling could best be described as iconic but I bet you there's a bunch of little details that you hadn't noticed before now most badges you would expect to be down on the front of the hood but Volkswagen has placed their Volkswagen badge right here on top of the Volkswagen now of course this is because when you hit someone you don't want to leave a Volkswagen imprint on their leg you want to leave it on their forehead this is one of the weirdest exterior quirks of the beetle right down here it's running boards now you expect to see running boards on modern-day trucks to help you climb in or like 1920s Duesenberg that you see in old black-and-white movies but on the beetle well I'm not really sure why they're here because if I step on them I stand way too high to get in I mean I guess I'd be useful if I have to go shoot up a bank or something Volkswagen only saw it necessary to put one side view mirror on the Volkswagen Beetle and that's of course because in 1971 you didn't actually need to merge to the right you would only ever be merging to the left the other thing you'll notice on the exterior of the beetle is this door hinge it's actually exposed now normally you'd expect these to be inside the door but Volkswagen has put them here on the outside folks who I can have been very German about this whole door hinge thing and they've actually made it so that the door can only open so far based on this little stopper built into the door hinge check this out see it only goes that far the beetle is rear-engined which means the gas tank is in the front and the gas tank filler is right here next to your front wheel now there's no visible way to get in to the gas cap you have to know the secret and there is this little tiny pull string underneath the dashboard and you pull it and it Springs open because it's so happy it's finally getting gas it was a fuel crisis after all now the added benefit to this is there is no need for a locking gas cap because if the car is locked you can't get to the fuel tank filler one other weird thing you'll notice on that gas cap Volkswagen it recommends 91 octane fuel for a 60 horsepower flat four cylinder with a single barrel carburetor 91 octane another exterior quirk is the door handle now it has this little lever right here but the lever is very short and so it's kind of hard to just use your two fingers and you end up having to use your thumb but the question is why didn't Volkswagen just make the lever longer so you had more leverage it's already weird that the Volkswagen Beetle has tires that are frankly narrower than most modern motorcycles but it gets even weirder when you take a look at the owners menu because Volkswagen will tell you that you should inflate your front tires to 16 psi and you should inflate your rears to 27 psi now the upside of all this is that the tires only cost about 45 dollars a piece but it is weird how low you should inflate them beetles have a super distinctive chirping sound and it turns out it's all due to these right here the exhaust tips let's hear what they sound like with them on and let's see how different it sounds with the exhaust tips off this is just the exhaust tips not the muffler that is a huge difference now that chirping noise within the Volkswagen community is called the fleam I kid you not FWE e/m clean modern vehicles typically do a pretty good job of hiding toe hooks under plastic covers and bumpers but not the beetle they actually leave it exposed right down here there's one in the front and one in the back on most vehicles it's kind of normal to need a key to get into your trunk but here on the beetle the engine is in the trunk so you need a key to get into your engine let me demonstrate and then there's your engine so this car has four wheel drum brakes but the pads are manually adjustable you see as you drive around and you use your brakes of pads wear down which means they move further and further away from the brake drum so to move them closer as they wear on the inside of the wheel there's a little itty-bitty star you have to turn it with a screwdriver to bring the pads back out against the drums as franny will show you right now how do you adjust the brakes on a beetle Frannie let's see how this is done well we obviously have some dragging going on here so what we're going to do is we're gonna run our little adjustment stars out a bit until the noise goes away that's gonna be a step one and then we'll rotate them back in till the noise comes in and then that gives us a definite point and then we're gonna back them off a few clicks and that should be it the Volkswagen even has a more interesting key than its competition during the day see we've organized here a set of keys from around the same era and you know most cars those days had a square key and a round key and the round key would get you in the door and the square key would start the car but not the Volkswagen check this out it's got a nice fun round key that does pretty much everything pretty much everything on the inside of the beetle feels like you should only use two fingers to operate it like these little tiny door locks and these little tiny door handles and these little tiny arm rests it's kind of cute well except for that giant pocket down there that's pretty big but even on the inside the pedals you feel like you could use two toes to push down the gas pedals the shifter feels like you use two to shift it everything's so delicate and cute listen to the door for the vent windows here on the side it's actually kind of a three-step process to get them open first you have to twist this little knob then you can open up the latch and then you can push open the window so these petals as I mentioned they're quite small you can see that you really only need one toe to push any of them but they're also really close together and they're hinged at the bottom instead of being hinged at the top like most pedals today it's locked and there's a good reason for that because on this beetle here well it's kind of different than a lot of other cars normally you'd reach under the dashboard and pull lever and that's how you get access to your engine compartment but obviously there's no engine under the hood here so you have to reach into the glove box and pull a little lever and that's when you get access to the storage compartment in the front trunk one of the problems with this whole lever then open trunk system is that if you don't pull the lever the right way the trunk doesn't actually open so then you kind of have to go back and then eventually you can open the trunk so there's not too much weird stuff in the trunk of this beetle actually we kind of been lying to you this whole time this is a Super Beetle you know that because the spare tire lies flat no Super Beetle and it has a McPherson strut front suspension which means the front trunk is actually really big what is well it's definitely a quirk is this lining so on most cars the trunk will be lined in a felt or maybe a leather if you're looking at something luxurious not the Super Beetle this is a mixture of like cardboard and plastic and paper I'm pretty sure it's flammable but what is miraculous is that it's still in pretty good condition given the fact that it's 47 years old it hasn't fallen out or rotted away the beetle is a car of ones it has one speaker in the dashboard which was actually optional it didn't even come standard up here it has just one interior light and back in the engine bay it has one carburetor more ones in the Volkswagen there's only one light for the indicators it doesn't matter if you're indicating left or indicating right this same two arrow omnidirectional light flashes anyway something that's not a one though is the hazard lights because when you pull the little emergency button the button flashes and the little indicator light flashes this little button is a brake warning indicator bulb and it tells you when your brakes have failed but funnily enough Volkswagen have included a fail-safe system to make sure that the light bulb in the brake fail system actually works so you can push the button and if the light comes on you know that the light bulb in your brake failure warning system is still working most Sun visors come out of their place and let you move them around but what's kind of funny about this one is that it sort of just swings out into your camera these visors just sort of keep going for a while but that's not the only funny part about the visors the passenger side has a little cute tiny mirror but the driver's side they get nothing I suppose you could just use the rear view mirror instead so these three little guys here are totally bizarre this first lever obviously is your parking brake it works just like you'd expect but these two unlabeled levers I forget what they do every time I jump into the car because they are completely unlabeled and make no sense so the right one here this guy that controls your here that's on and off so because this car is air-cooled it doesn't have heater hoses or lines it uses just warm heat coming off the exhaust system now this left lever that controls whether or not you're getting heat in to the front or the rear part of the passenger compartment now for the rear occupants the heater is so effective because it's right near their foot in some cases you can even mount your shoes or so I've been told with the rear heater on but if you put it to the front here well it's almost completely useless because by the time the hot air reaches the windshield it's gone pretty much cold steering wheel is of course interesting on the beetle you have this really large but thin black plastic steering wheel with this little badge in the center here and if you don't know Volkswagens and you wouldn't know what this badge means but this is the Wolfsburg badge or the badge of the city of Wolfsburg which is where volkswagen has its headquarters so there's a river because Wolfsburg on a river and then there's this little castle which of course Wolfsburg has a castle and there's a wolf hence the name Wolfsburg getting into the backseat of a beetle is it's really easy which is super surprising you know modern cars that are two doors usually back seats are tiny have to squeeze back there it's a contortionist act not in the beetle it's a one-finger operation to move that front seat forward and then just hop on back here and even with this front seat in its back position this seat is comfortably far back for the front passenger I still have tons of room now there are a couple of weird things stepping back here first off if you do need some extra help there are these nice grab handles which can also double as coat hooks and ashtrays this car is old-school so both rear passengers get an ashtray we're in the front they have to share these rear windows they don't move at all they don't slide open they don't crack open they don't roll down they're fixed into place there are some more surprises under the rear seat of the beetle I'm not kidding under the rear seat take a look first off there is your battery it's not in the front it's not in the back by the engine it's under the rear seats as well as your tool kit and this little guy now this little strap reveals some pretty cool magic about these old Volkswagens and that's because this rear seat folds for extra storage space you can put a lot of stuff in a beetle so first off I have to take out this little parcel shelf this is not factory original and then on the right side of the seat through this little flimsy lever I pull and step out the whole seat can fold down or I can fold back up but what's the strap for so the strap holds the seat in its down position because like you just saw if it's not held in place it'll just snap back up back when Felix came out it didn't actually have a tachometer but given it has a manual transmission you did need to know when to shift so Volkswagen conveniently included these little markings on the speedo to tell you pretty much what redline is in each gear so you see there's a one right at about 16 miles an hour there's a two at about I don't know 32 miles an hour a 3 at 46 miles an hour and well that's pretty much it you only got to do 90 oh you can do more than that you said to pushing off click ok this is a really cool piece of tech that comes on these old Volkswagens this is a Jack I've jacked it up I'll show you how it jacks down actually maybe I won't I don't know if I know how it Jack's down freaking eh okay so like I was saying this is a jack on a 71 Volkswagen and volkens of this era have a jacking points pre-installed so this rod goes into this tube right here like that and then if I had the right tool I could start jacking with an extension and it would lift the vehicle obviously the Volkswagen has a four-speed manual transmission what's kind of weird though is just how cute and tiny the knob is and of course another strange thing is that reverse is actually down to the left which for this period vehicle is quite strange the last thing that's kind of odd about the interior here is the ashtray actually has the shift pattern rather than the shift knob so you have your little 1 2 3 4 neutral and reverse if you've ever been in an original air-cooled beetle with an original interior they had this really distinct smell it's just well it kind of smells like a barn and there's a reason for that that's because I kid you not in these old air-cooled of beetles they used a horsehair material to trim the seats to pad the seats and that's why you can see down here it's it's just like it's falling out overage and and that's what you're left with is this hairy stuff all over your carpets our next weird feature comes in the form of the windshield wipers now they're two-speed you have slow and then uncomfortably fast but the squirter is the really weird part so I push in on the windshield wiper control button and well it's trying to squirt you can see you can really see it's trying and the reason it's trying is because the spare tire has gone flat the reason the spare tire has gone flat is because the washer system in this car uses the air pressure from the spare tire to pressurize this tank which then forces the washer fluid up through this hose and into the nozzle now what this means is as a Volkswagen owner you have to create around one of these little guides which is a portable bike pump because your spare tire is always going flat because you're either using your washer system or a leak has occurred in one of the lines which means you're going to spend a lot of time sitting here pumping up a spare tire because you wanted to see out of the windshield I don't know why they designed it like that but you know what that's just part of the Volkswagen lifestyle we make says the meatiest horn in the world how does it drive well we're not gonna tell you that it drives like a 911 gt3 because of course it's nothing like a 911 let's see no yeah I don't think you're going around the Nurburgring at seven and a half minutes of this thing what the beetle has a certain familiarity that very reminiscent of a 911 actually I mean if you think about it the the layout is very familiar it's a boxer engine rear engine rear-wheel drive manual transmission I mean it's you know in effect a very similar design to abortion yeah well I mean you know you can trace that lineage right you've got the current 911 gt3 you got the 997 you got that 99 six you got the 993 yeah you've got all the series of air-cooled 911 I had the 356 and then this right and you know there's not a whole lot to separate this from speed 56 no we've been told by a friend Franny that they do drive quite differently but they aside the point I mean you're running a unibody rear-engined air-cooled four-cylinder with the force first Porsche right and this is a unibody rear-engine air-cooled Volkswagen still four-cylinder yeah and still designed by preferred and Porsche you know I think what's really surprising is this car is 47 years old and it actually still drives pretty new I mean the the shifter isn't exactly sloppy the steering is pretty precise the brakes are life but they they manage to do their job it's very engaging to drive the a super engaging super fun and everybody a lot of smiles at you because you're gonna be a plus you can see everything everything you don't need this other mirror because you can just turn your head look and see what's thanks to you well Tommy I think it's time to give it a Doug I mean a TfL scale score yeah exactly so our TfL scale is buy it Lisa rent it or forget it well leasing it's kind of out of the question so is renting and I think you'd have a hard time leasing or renting an old needle also it's either buy it or forget it well then you're not gonna forget the people no how could you forget a beetle so logically you'd have to buy it it's a buy it for sure this is an amazing little car and easy buy it as always this is Tommy and Michael with the Fastlane car and the Fastlane now we'll see you guys right here next Sunday 14 FL beetle Diaries and also guys starting to miss last Sunday we've just been super busy traveling yeah but it will be back next Sunday

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Id: 2DmnpiExa4w

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 17 2018