I won’t name names, but you’ve all seen actors and musicians that just flat out refuse to grow old gracefully. Sadly, in many cases, their attempts to make themselves look younger and more hip only make them appear worse than if they’d left well enough alone. (Though what really matters is how they feel, and I can respect that). The same situation has existed in the automotive world. Car companies will try to make angular cars look curvy if trends start to go that way, or straighten out lines of a rounded car if fashions dictate, all with as minimal effort as possible. Ground effects, more “updated” lighting assemblies, and “body cladding” are all used as attempts to disguise decade (or more) old designs. Most of the time, it just doesn’t work.
Some examples are below- can you think of more?
Of all the cases of extreme facelifting to keep ancient cars looking “current,” it’s hard to find better examples (or worse examples, really) than some products sold in South American, particularly ones offered by divisions of Ford.
One of these cars is the Ford Falcon, or namely the first compact sedan that Ford debuted for the American public in 1959. This exact body was sold in Argentina until the 1990s, and in the eighties Ford attempted to “update” the machine with the fashions of the day, meaning black trim, composite headlights, and more modern wheels. The end result is almost creepy, like something out of a sci-fi movie of an alternate future:
Ford of Brazil did a similar thing with its trucks. Take a look at the passenger compartment for this rounded-nosed vehicle below. Yup, that’s the new-for-1967 fifth-generation F-Series truck there:
What if you are a designer working for Volkswagen of Brazil, a company that famously made the original VW Beetle (which the company called the “Fusca”) up through the Clinton administration years. One day in the early eighties, your bosses walk in and start screaming in Portuguese, lauding the aesthetics of this rather ham-fisted ‘new’ Falcon in Argentina. You are now assigned to do something similar to the poor Fusca.
This job will truly suck. Can you imagine how odd and disturbing the result would look? Well, imagine no more, dear Autopians, since we’re about to step into this poor Brazilian designer’s shoes and give it a shot.
Thankfully, for some reason, as a designer you are able to receive brain waves from halfway across the globe, including those of a pre-teen boy in North Carolina named Jason (remember, we’re imagining we’re back in the early 1980s). This child has yet to have his mind filled whatever corrupt thoughts typically fill a teen’s mind, and now his head is just overflowing with ideas for the VW Beetle. There are two ideas which you intercept from him that would only have come to light decades later when he became one of the greatest automotive voices of his generation, at least to those that find dick and fart jokes funny.
The two ideas this from this kid for updating the Beetle include blacking out the B pillar and adding a hatchback.
However, there’s another trend in Brazil that has existed for years and is hard to comprehend, but we’ll latch onto it anyway. For whatever reason, some Fusca owners will do extensive (and I mean EXTENSIVE) modifications to their old Beetles, often adding entire front and rear clips from other cars and carefully fairing them into the original car. This process must have required hundreds of hours of work and many tins of whatever the Brazilian equivalent of Bondo is. The goal with these artisans seems to be not only adding individuality to the looks of their rather ubiquitous rides, but also attempting to convert to an aesthetic of lower, modern lighting clusters that hug the bumpers on both ends of their cars, ditching the friendly face up front and the elephant toenail rear fixtures.
WARNING: The below images are graphic in nature and might be disturbing for some readers:
sources: Jalopnik/Jason Torchinsky
I’m not sure how, um, how much of an improvement these are to the Beetle’s looks, but since we’re going all-in on the crazy here, why not attempt something similar on our new Fusca?
First, we’ll take Jason’s blackout idea a bit further by enlarging the dark window perimeter to include hiding the cabin exhaust vent behind the rear window as well. For the hatchback part, Jason was suggesting using the VW Type 3’s flatter ‘pancake’ engine to give more cargo space, but there is no way that the Brazil division will want to spend that kind of time and money reengineering this old car. However, if you’ve ever looked at the cargo area behind a Beetle’s rear seat, or as a Gen X toddler ever ridden back there in pre-car seat days with your siblings and friends, you’ll know that just having the fucking glass window open would do wonders to accessing this space. I’ve made a fiberglass frame to hold the new glass and accommodate the hinges and latch.
Besides these two changes, our ‘new’ 1984 Fusca would smooth out the front and rear fenders, filling in the current light fixture openings and mounting new, modern clusters to the tops of the bumpers front and rear sitting slightly back from the front surface. This would be easily the least expensive way of getting that ‘low light’ look that the customizers seem to hold so dear; VW Brazil would not want to shell out the cash for the tooling to make the body changes needed to ‘fair in’ the lights to the body. Plus, these fixtures could just bolt on and off if you need a replacement.
We could even mount the small Brazil number plate in back above the bumper to allow the engine compartment to be ‘shaved’ as well (you can still get the door open, since I am imagining the plate could flip down or even lift with the engine cover).
Inside, you can see that the Fusca had the flat, old school pre-Super Beetle dash.
To this we could update things a bit by adding a bumped-out section for the gauges that also features ‘fingertip’ buttons on the sides similar to concurrent Audis. On the passenger side, a similar ‘bumpout’ would increase glove box space.
Like that Argentinian Falcon, this concept for a New Fusca is an uncomfortable mixture of different eras at odds with each other. But what do I know? There must have been a market for these types of low-dollar, home-grown, strangely updated vehicles since they obviously did find buyers in this part of the world. Also, with Fuscas we’ve obviously seen some individuals willing to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort to make their cars look like this.
Still, if you’re after the fountain of youth, plastic surgery is something you need to be careful with- it doesn’t always produce the results that you are looking for.
All illustrations by The Bishop
The Volkswagen Beetle’s Strangest Design Decision (theautopian.com)
A Daydreaming Designer Looks At An Alternate Van Reality for Volkswagen – The Autopian
The “Intellectual Father” Of The Volkswagen Beetle Was An 18-Year Old Student – The Autopian
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Anyone else do a double take when they realized the original beetle wasn’t a hatchback?
Engineer/ Designer Jorge Tomadoni was a criterious man with a small Budget. The 82 Falcon restyling work really Well when You get accustomed to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC0mfzMHWxY&ab_channel=Oldtimer
Leandro- remember, I am not faulting the designers on the Falcon. I’m fully aware of how difficult a task that must have been! As you can see, I proved how difficult it is with trying to do the same thing with the Fusca and the Ford was far more successful!
Are we REALLY keeping the wing windows in this update? They went the way of the Dodo on all cars by the late 70’s
Well, I’m going to be that guy and say: VW 1500!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillman_Avenger#Argentina
Nice thoughts on the Beetle. But I think it’s too expensive to make new steel stamping forms for the front fenders without the front light indents. So the silver painted plastic housings for the “modern” headlights could somehow come out from the old holes in the fenders? Maybe the seal between the plastic and steel could be camouflaged by some fake vents or parts bin shelf parking lights. That would look really cheap and nasty. But not much worse than the black slap on front radiator on the busses..
Around here (DK) we get fined for temporarily covering up the rear license plates. So for $10 you can buy a piece of black China plastic with room for an extra license plate and two very cheap hardware store rear light clusters with blinkers and brake lights, and then a wire down to the trailer electrical connector, that you then bungee cord fasten to the back of your bicycle holder (which sits on the trailer hitch) And viola, lawfull driving!
– Anyway your rear section of the VW reminds me of just such a thing 🙂
Those contraptions are also nice to have, if you are out saving and old trailer or something, where nothing has worked for years. So basicly a cheap civil version of the loose lightbars, salvage vehicles have.
Jakob- yes, there is really no easy way to add the ‘modern’ lights and not look out of place. I had also looked at a strange solution with body colored or black rubber structures in front with the lights incorporated but that looked even worse if you can believe it (very much like some of the Beetles in that collage from Jason’s article).
I want you to look at Mamie Van Doren in Untamed Youth. Tell me again why taking away round headlights is a good idea. Apologize to that Beetle.
Durepoxi is brazilian equivalent to bondo.
But many of those restyled bugs are worked in the sheet metal, many of them are pure work of craftsmanship, although of questionable taste.
Oh, my ecclesiastical friend, you need a bit of info regarding how Brazilians do “economy”. One division will spend millions to save up thousands, provided they’re not the ones coughing up the dough. Many times I’ve seen “cost cutting” measures that were themselves say more wasteful than the savings. Picture a firm hiring consultants to optimizer the office pantry, to brag about $500 savings every month, at a contractual cost of $20,000 a year (true story, btw).
All this just to say that they would’ve approved the pancake engine (we had it for the Variants) and the full front end clip – however, being this 1984, I would expect them to graft a full cold War default car face (not unlike the one on the ZombieFalcon). And, if this restyling were to be done in the 70’s, I would expect a Brasília front end there (like your VW 412, IIRC)).
But, in the end, they didn’t had to bother e cause people would till buy it. Actual quote from an anonymous VW engineer to a magazine: “If we can sell 1,000 kg of metal that had R&D paid 60 years ago, why change?”. He meant, of course, the VW T2 that we had up until 2014 – check it out, on its last days it sported a water-cooled engine and a Vader-like rebreather tacked on the front end.
Ruivo- this is great information! Glad to hear someone with a realistic take on what the Brazilian industry would do! I’ve always found it to be a fascinating alternate universe of automobiles.
thank you, the WARNING was warranted!
Maximize the cringe-factor with a Porsche whale tail!
Boxing Pistons- was actually mentioning in an earlier comment that since the ‘hatchback’ frame might be fiberglass, I am sure that they would want to put a ‘kick up’ spoiler at the bottom to act as an air intake but I wasn’t brave enough to go all out with this thing.
That old Ford pickup is almost as barf-worthy as some of those owner-modded Beetles. Good lord!
Another good example of constantly updating a very old design is VW’s Santana. It was built on the B2 platform from the early 80’s through 2012 with various bodywork changes in China, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere. I remember riding in them many times during my frequent trips to China where 99% of taxis were Santanas. Most cop cars and other municipal vehicles utilized them as well. I think even Ford Brazil licensed these as well. Crazy..
Boxing Pistons- there’s also a Gen II Jetta that they made in China up until about ten years ago
The most sacrilegeous of those Beetles is the one with the Chevrolet (really Opel) Corsa B front end. At least the others use VW parts.
How would this work with the radiator/watercooled I4 update the bus got in Brazil? Might actually end up looking like one of the home built ones with the Jetta front clip…
66mustang289- it probably would. If I recall those had a big (usually) black box stuck in the front center, so if you tried to blend in the front lights with that it would start to appear like a clip from a different car was stuck on front.
I kinda dig a couple of those bastardized Beetles. I personally don’t like Beetles of any variety (unless you consider a 356 or a 911 to be a variety of Beetle), but I appreciate the work that went into those custom ones.
That Brazilian Ford F1000 however is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.
I kind of want to look for model kits of the falcon and the F1000 just to produce that sense of unease in others.
Among the modded Beetles, I actually like that green-gold one a lot. The dark blue with the red and yellow slash on the door isn’t too bad either.
This is a fun article, with a lot of interesting ideas.
On the Bishop-modded new bug’s rear, it would help a lot if the engine hatch’s top line was modified to be horizontal instead of curved. Even if it meant bringing the outer corners up instead of the top edge down. You would also want to harmonize the width of the engine hatch with the width of the rear window hatch. It would be cheaper to narrow the engine hatch, but look nicer if you widened the window hatch.
If then the two hatches met at the same height as the bottom edge of the side windows, we’d have a whole new level of appeal for whole rear of the car. It would also be simpler to manufacture, especially if you’re already insetting the rear window into an upward-opening hatch.
These changes would clean up both the design and the manufacturing at minimal cost. If this were done at the surface level, over the main stampings, they could even keep the metal dies to make the panels mostly the same. You need a bit of change to make the rear window a hatch. But you could use a slightly narrower engine cover with some filler panels in the body on the outboard edges. It’d look a little bodgy.
On the other hand, a small change to the presses might be affordable and get a much cleaner result.
I would’ve bought a “modernized” bug, if they were kept cheap. But not if the headlight pods were bolt-ons. They’d have to be integrated.
PaysOutAllNight- I like your thinking on this. I was actually imagining that might even have to be the super-cheap solution where they simply remove the rear window and have a metal or fiberglass frame for the new window that would go over the existing opening. The frame would need to have provisions to allow air to still get into the engine vents (sadly I could see them wanting to integrate a little ‘rear spoiler’ into the bottom of the frame). It all depends on how far they would take things and, most importantly, what could easily be changed on the tooling. We just had a meeting late yesterday looking at a plastic injection molding tool to see what changes we could make without having to end up with a $50,000 boat anchor.
I feel like the best way to get a Beetle with a hatchback and integrated lights is to simply buy a VW Brasilia, which came out in 1975.
In the late 70’s/early 80’s some at VWB fought tooth and nail to keep the Brasilia and pull the plug on the Beetle, but by then Management was afraid it could harm sales of the upcoming Gol, so they keep the “wrong” car in line.
I think I’ll suggest a “what if” with a Brasília that survived!
Ruivo- yes, the Brasilia always did remind me of the VW 412 (that my parents did indeed own). It was released about the same time as the 412, which was a redesign of the 411 by Wisconsin, USA based designer Brooks Stevens. Did he design the Brasilia as well, was VW Brazil influenced by this, or did they end up at the same solution by accident?
I think that if they would go through the trouble of making new, smoothed out front fenders they would just integrate the lights as well.
mr. choppers- that’s true, but the idea was to possibly use the same bumper front and rear with mounting points in it. Again, the cheap solution. If they tried it today, they would make faired in lights sort of similar to early Beetles for a ‘retro’ look, but remember in 1984 they were trying to capture the style of the day, regardless of how incongruous and silly it looked.
Never saw that Lada update and I had a Canadian model
Sklooner- if I am correct, it was (mercifully) a prototype and never reached production. I never saw it until researching this article.
Man that thing is ugly. But I LOVE the idea of the rear glass hatch! Probably would have been tough to access though reaching over the engine every time you need to reach in the cargo area.
TaRule- that would be the ideal solution, as Jason showed in his scribbles, but there is no way that VW Brazil would have that kind of money to spend on redevelopment. With the raised glass, you’d likely need to get to the side of the car to reach down deep into the cargo area, but I PROMISE you it is better than digging for stuff through the back seat area…if you ever lived with one of these you’ll know what I’m saying. ANY solution is better than nothing.
I kinda like the blue mutant Beetle in the bottom left pic.
Me too. The back fender is bobbed a bit giving it a Baja flavor. Still odd to my eyes, but nicely done
I think it (sorta) works because they brought the hood forward to the grill. Why is there a grill?
To allow for electric air conditioning?
I don’t know why, obviously, but I don’t hate it, that’s my favorite of the six pixels
the yellow Fusca with the Jetta(?) nose sort of looks like a modernized Volvo 122/Amazon.
And the Black one gives me strong Volvo PV444/PV544 vibes.
Have you dreamt yet of a Maverick RS? A rally bred Ford Maverick with the guts of a Focus RS?
Arch Duke- I know that the original ‘performance’ (if you can call it that) version of the Ford Maverick was called ‘The Grabber’, which does not sound like a good name for a car today. Sounds like a vehicle that would get called into HR a lot.
Ford still uses Grabber Blue as a color right?
Arch Duke- I’m not sure, but with retro everything now it would make sense. Just don’t call a whole car that. Please.
Or, double down: The Ford Fondler!
They did modernize the Beetle. It’s called the 911.
The rear looks way better than I expected, but, woof, that front…
I love that the old dash is so stripped down, it has a blank gauge.
I was surprised with the rear as well. It is putting out serious Porsche vibes. I kinda dig it!
Oh god. The front is SO bad.
I can kinda see the rear as a Porsche-esque look, and I love the hatch idea and blacked out B pillar, but the front… dear sweet baby Jesus swaddled up for a nap in heaven, why did you let me see this today?
Also, I don’t hate the updated Falcon. Would def prefer the older style, but the updated isn’t too bad for an ’80s car. Kinda Benz-ish
It actually does hide the age pretty well, I mean, it’s clearly still an older design, but, glancing at it, you might think a facelift of something from the mid 1970s, rather than the early ’60s
Mr. Asa- the Falcon works better than you’d think, but it still looks strange. I mean, at some point you’d think they’d just try to grab the old Fox Fairmont tooling and call it a day.
100% agreement there.
Similar to the back hatch thing, it works, but… a better solution can be designed
That updated Falcon looks like it would have been at home in an ’80s spy movie from before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
KennyB- probably because it’s similar to those behind-the-iron-curtain cars updated-too-much cars I showed at the top of the article. There are plenty more where that came from if you do some searching- it’s fun to see!
Hey, come on, GAZ only facelifted the Volga M24 (thinks about it), 5? times in 40 years, and they pulled it off sort of OK. Well, up until the last one, anyway, that nose maybe didn’t work so well.
Mr. Asa- it’s to prove that you can do a mid-cycle refresh up to when a car is like, say, five years old, but beyond that you just can’t turn an apple into an orange. It typically doesn’t work, particularly with something as iconic as the Beetle.