This Chinese Knockoff VW Beetle Is Incredible And So Half-Assed

Over the weekend a reader named Lucas sent me a link from our pals over at Motor1 about a remarkably brazen and seemingly delightfully shoddy Volkswagen Beetle knockoff made by some little Chinese electric vehicle company. I’m a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t find this on my own, but oh well – the world is a vast, busy place, and I’m just excited to be aware of these now. Let’s look at some of the details of these strangely fascinating machines, at least what we can tell from the pictures provided on their sales pages. It’ll be fun, I half-heartedly promise!

These not-really-Beetles seem to be mostly made by a company called Wecan, and the outfit doesn’t seem to be deluding themselves into thinking that they’re building actual, fully usable everyday automobiles. Instead, they are being sold as “Show Cars” and “Wedding Cars,” implying that, while they are drivable, they are really just intended for short, slow drives. That seems appropriate considering they appear to have pretty rudimentary electric drivetrains powered by lead-acid batteries.

It’s also telling what they’re intended for when you look at the “application” section of the product page, which reads like a movie theater concession menu:

So, applications are chips or ice cream or candy or donuts? Gotcha.

I mean that makes sense, these may be used as little food trucks or carts; I’ve seen the VW Microbus versions of this same sort of crude EVs before, but this is the first time I’ve seen an old-school Beetle.

Let’s look at these not-Beetles more carefully:

They’re sort of wonky in the way the body seems to sit on the chassis. They appear to be based on, I’d say, a 1968-1969-ish Beetle, though there are definitely later parts. The body is all fiberglass, and I think a lot of the molds were made from actual Beetle body parts. Let’s look at some in more detail:

The bumpers, for example, which are mounted much too low, seem to be made from casts of real Mexican Beetle bumpers, which from 1975 to 2003 incorporated the front turn indicators into the bumpers – you can see the un-cut-out cutouts right there in the bumper itself. Turn signals are included, but seem to be whatever the company had around, as there are examples of low-fender mounted ones like these and fender-top ones closer to what original Beetles used.

Other odd details: there are no running boards, the side mirrors are oddly tall, and the hood handle is strangely large. The headlight trim rings are close but not quite right, in that they seem to be a uniform thickness instead of being thinner at the bottom like real ones.

Around back, the rear fender molds appear to be taken from a ’73 and up model, as the once-again un-punched-out holes for the taillights are the size and shape of the large “elephant’s foot” taillights. Those old Ford Model A-type taillights clearly don’t fit.

The mold for the engine lid also appears to have been made from an actual part, as you can see the indentation for the license plate light housing. Also interesting is the lack of engine cooling vents (not needed for the simple EV drivetrain these have), and the huge, archaic-looking door handles.

Oh, and what’s with that roof rack?

The fender and front trunk-body area seem to be all molded as one big piece, where the fenders would have been separate on an original Beetle. At the rear, the fender rubber welting line appears visible, suggesting the rear fenders could be separate, but that could also just be a detail of the mold.

The vent window appears to be fake, just a black line on the glass, and the door hinges are incredibly basic, like hardware store fence gate hinge. The chrome door molding of an actual Beetle is just a detail in the fiberglass mold. The rear of at least one version of the car seems to have a VW logo, which I bet most of these don’t, because that would be playing with fire even more so than Wecan already is.

Part of me loves that these absurd things exist, and I can’t help but wonder if you could plonk this fiberglass body onto an actual Type 1 VW chassis with its air-cooled flat-four and all that. I bet you could. They go for between $5,800 and $8,500, which might end up being cheaper than buying used body parts individually, and these would be guaranteed rust-free.

I also find it kind of incredible these exist, because China was not one of the countries where Volkswagen Beetles were really sold in any numbers. The Beetle’s cultural power is significant enough that I’m sure China had some awareness of the Beetle, but it wasn’t anything close to what, say, Europe or the Americas was in terms of the Beetle being a known cultural icon. So are these just produced for the intent of exporting them, or is there a significant demand for Beetle-shaped crude EVs in China, too?

I know the Ora Punk Cat and Ora Ballet cat have already taken the classic Beetle design and translated it into a new EV, but in the case of the Ora the design language was modernized and everything was redesigned and refined, and the result is clearly inspired by the original Beetle, as opposed to the Wecan product, which is very much just a knockoff, even literally so.

The closest example of this I can think of was from way back in the 1950s, when a Barcelona-based company called Orix made a car called the Orix 610, with an air-cooled flat twin and a body that was quite clearly a copy of the Beetle:

For whatever reason, VW never seemed overly upset by the very few Orixes that were made, and maybe Wecan is hoping to have the same luck. They also could go into the classic Beetle fiberglass replacement body parts business if this doesn’t pan out, too!

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