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

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bugatti Chiron Won’t Get a Roadster Version

The all-new Bugatti Chiron hypercar will not get a convertible version like its Veyron predecessor did. Speaking to Autocar at the London grand opening of the sole Bugatti showroom in the U.K., marketing boss Stefan Brungs confirmed that the French automaker’s latest hypercar will only be sold in coupe format, with “no roadster or convertible” version in the plans. Brungs also said that the company is only planning on selling the allotted 500 Chirons as standard, so faster variants like a Super Sports version also aren’t likely. This is a very different strategy than the Veyron, which has targa top Grand Sport and Super Sports models, as well as a number of special edition models. The Chiron is set to try to break the world record for fastest car and attempt to beat the Veyron’s record of 268 mph. It is believed that the Chiron will be able to hit 288 mph. Powered by an 8.0-liter W16 engine with 1,500 horsepower and 1,106 pound-feet of torque, it shouldn’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more