Skip to main content

Please Don’t Spend $1 Million on this Beetle

I think it’s time we all sit down and, as a group, face the fact that things are getting of hand.

Air-cooled Beetles are great. I love ’em. Original, low mile cars are interesting. I want one. A car’s value is often determined by emotion. I instinctually understand that. But it’s time we all agree that we’ve grown a little too comfortable with the idea of spending $1 million on a car and take a moral accounting of what that means.

Yes, this Beetle has only 22 miles on the odometer. Yes, it’s rare. Yes, it’s a good generation of Beetle (not the best, though). But no, spending half of the annual budget entire Village of Cold Spring, New York for it is not reasonable.

The only reason to think that a Beetle is worth $1 million is because you think that if you don’t drive and sell it again next year, it’ll be worth more. And that’s what today’s kids are calling a speculative bubble, something Dutch tulip enthusiasts tangled with 300 years ago and we’ve apparently never gotten over. Their bubble popped, so will this one.

And that’s to say nothing of the moral cost of rich people shuffling money around amongst themselves, spending ludicrous sums on luxury items that benefit no one apart from an even smaller cohort of wealthy artisans (mechanics) who serve them.

Yes, other people are allowed to spend their money how they like, and I’m no financial expert but it doesn’t take a professor of economics to see that spending $1 million on a Beetle is stupid. So allow me to suggest some much less stupid ways to spend $1 million:

  1. Spend $9,500 on this “unmolested” ’64 Beetle in near perfect condition (a Beetle that actually runs and drives and whose hoses haven’t spent 54 years hardening into brittle trash that will clog carb jets and brake systems).
  2. Spend $990,000 on Puerto Rico Relief. Or on hospitals. Or give it to a library. Pay for someone’s medical care if you want to make be sure your money will have a big impact. Pay someone’s college tuition if you want to feel a little less sad. Spend too much money on local goods if you want to improve the lives in your proximity. Invest in blue chip stocks if your only concern is turning a profit. Do all of the above. Or just give it to your mom, she deserves it.

Do that and you get a very cool car that is every bit the time capsule the million dollar bug is, but has the added benefit of also being, you know, a car–seriously, the 22-mile Beetle is effectively a 1:1 Hot Wheels. Plus, you’re doing immeasurably more support other humans, make the world a better place, or just earn a little money in a financially sound way.

$1,000,000 is a lot of money and it’s ridiculous to squirrel it all away buying a product that trades all of its functionality for a number on an odometer and then charges a literal 10,000% markup.

So yeah, please don’t spend $1,000,000 on this Beetle.

The post Please Don’t Spend $1 Million on this Beetle appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2O7QoFa
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Saying Goodbye to the CC V6

For all its size and its global reach, Volkswagen is still, in many ways, a deeply human company. There was, for instance, the Bugatti Veyron an ego project if ever there was one. Then the purchase of Ducati, a move most called folly. And then there was the Phaeton, the Volkswagen that most folks can’t afford. Not only were these moves all strange, I’m sure that they made VW’s accountants furious. None of them made good business sense, but they were all deeply interesting and they all are evidence of the heart that beats at the center of VW. Among these follies is the CC, a car that everyone agrees is rakishly handsome, but that no one really wanted to buy. The car couldn’t last, but the world is brighter for its having been in it. With the approach debut of the Arteon, it seems like a good time to look back on its sadly departing predecessor. The version I drove, because I live in Canada, is a V6 Wolfsburg Edition, which apparently isn’t available in the States. Nor is the V6, not as...
Post a Comment
Read more

T-Prime Makes World Premiere at Beijing

[ See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com ] The SUV segment is one of the fastest growing segments in the world and Volkswagen is showing the world how to do it. With the new T-Prime Concept GTE that was revealed today, the company is showing off all of the technology you can look for in its coming models. The T-Prime is a full-size hybrid SUV that can go up to 31 miles on a charge and gets 87 mpg. The hybrid power station is good for 375 hp and 516 lb/ft of torque and puts the power down with 4MOTION all wheel drive. It’ll get you up to 60 in six seconds. The concept’s real party piece, though, is its interior, which features exclusively touch, gesture, and voice controls. Everything from the infotainment, to the display, and even the gears are controlled by touch-screen. The T-Prime Concept GTE is bigger than the Touareg, and design elements are likely to find their way into all of their SUVs, of which there will be many. Volkswagen is also announcing that they expect to make an S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Watch: The Transport Does a Whole Hell of a lot More than Transport

Petrolicious doesn’t only feature million-dollar classics, it also features the more generally neat, like this 1996 T4 Transporter that became Instagram famous and started and is starting an empire. Callum Creaser’s T4 started life as a panel van, but over the years it has become a homebrew camper van that has gone on adventures around the world. After posting about his adventures to Instagram, the diesel van gained a following and launched The Rolling Home, a series about other people’s small spaces and homey cars. Based on a 1.4-liter diesel with no ECU, Callum says his T4 is easy as pie to work on since information is widely available from sources like ours. The post Watch: The Transport Does a Whole Hell of a lot More than Transport appeared first on VWVortex . from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2KR01Sv via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more