The New Beetle makes its debut in an auto market that has accelerated lately.
Carmakers have overhauled old designs for the modern era: Volkswagen's New Beetle and the new Fiat 500 are obvious examples.
To revitalise Ford's floundering design department, Mr Nasser turned to a young outsider, J Mays, who designed the wacky new Beetle for Volkswagen.
We have little retro cars like the VW New Beetle (and a convertible is coming), the Mini from BMW and the Chrysler PT Cruiser.
One final thought on the New Beetle Convertible: It's not going to salvage VW sales all by itself, especially because it's got company coming.
Take the new Beetle, or the Audi TT: Both make brilliant use of circles and half-circles--and yet when seen in real life, they are strangely unconvincing.
Gone is the strange expanse of dash between the instrument console and the base of the windshield, caused by the (old) New Beetle's strictly circular roofline.
WSJ: 2012 Volkswagen Beetle Review: The Beetle Mans Up | Rumble Seat by Dan Neil
But I think it's more than that, and I didn't know what it was until one day I squinted at a new Beetle, and saw not a car but a plasma display.
Just ask Chicagoans Liz McCorry and Phil Koesterer, who found themselves perplexed at the prospect of replacing their Volkswagen New Beetle for a more accommodating ride with a child on the way.
Moving between the worlds of architecture and graphics, Rizzi also designed the Happy Rizzi House - an office building in Germany, the front page of a newspaper in Hamburg and three versions of the New Beetle for Volkswagen in 1999.
But versus, say, a Mazda Miata, the only other fun car in this price category, the New Beetle is loads more pragmatic, since you could legitimately take another passenger and still go buy a potted palm tree at the garden center.
It does not come as any surprise that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in the US can see the massive military potential for a new generation of supersensitive, miniature, robust, uncooled, infrared detectors inspired by a humble heat-seeking beetle.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Jewel beetle flies into the inferno
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