This is a long one. Don't even say shut up. I was thinking it. Your eye twitched. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Car Muddy Show, the most appropriate car podcast on the internet. My name is Discount Sandler, and that's hyphen. We're not going to give our real names after that comment. That's right. I didn't say anything. This episode is about the new VW...
ID Buzz, which is the new bus, which they finally delivered unto us after teasing it for two and a half decades. Yes, literal. Literally two and a half decades. This is not hyperbole. This particular moment is not hyperbole. In this episode, we discuss the goings-on behind the scenes of the making of Jason's now released today.
video, the icons episode about the ID Buzz and all of the sort of VW landscape that underpins its creation. And we probably talk about other stuff too. It's possible, but... I think we started out with Bruno Sacco. Somehow, I think this is an all-German episode. Anyway, if you like this content, please continue joining the Hagerty Drivers Club, which includes sexual innuendo, unlimited 24-7 guaranteed flatbed toes for all of your classic vehicles, unlimited access to our valuation.
tool, tickets to VIP and special events and discounts on your favorite automotive stuff. There is a link below for you to check that out. And Hagerty Podcast Network. Is it just a long episode or is it thick with a lot of... Okay. Veins. You brought something. It's true, something blue, something old, something new, or something, right? What's in that? Oh, yeah, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Okay, well, the something blue is a... Are you sure it's not green?
Are we going to really fight about this? This is green. That's green. That is a teal. Yeah. It's more blue than green. More blue than green. I mean, I don't really care. I just think it's great. Listening and not watching at home and in our background today is Derek's barrel. blue because i think they called it green um r129 mercedes designed by a dead guy that's a little bit insensitive
Bruno Sacco. The now, newly, dearly departed, well, newly now, it's going to be a while before this episode airs, but the dearly departed Bruno Sacco. Yes. A lot of people... reached out to me about it. I'm sorry for your loss, they said. Oh, really? You know what's funny is I was at a car show and somebody came over and they're like, oh, you guys, you and Derek are going to do another Bruno Sacco car show. And I'm like, well, we did it last year in November for his 90th birthday.
I guess we could do it for his 91st birthday if he's still alive. Why did you say that? He was already dead. Oh. As it turns out, he had already died. uh-huh yeah i was like when i looked at the date because the date that he died on the 19th but the news broke like a week you know 10 days later maybe yeah i was like oh god Did I kill Bruno Sacco? No, he was already dead. Exactly. That was the chain of guilt logic.
Because of course, if I had the power to just will someone dead, oh my God. There would be a lot of dead people. The roads would be free of Subarus. This episode is not about Subarus. Yes. I thought you were going to try and recover that sentiment, but you're just changing the subject about whether it's about Subarus. This episode is about Gewürzketchup von Volkswagen. Yeah. Would you like to explain what this is?
Part number... Oh, that's not actually a Volkswagen part number. My understanding was that the Currywurst, we've talked about this on the show, I'm sure, that Volkswagen serves in its canteens... house-made currywurst, that they have a factory that makes curry, or wurst, I guess. Yes, because what is currywurst? It's a wiener, it's a sausage with curry ketchup.
It is typically a bratwurst. I don't remember what exactly. So it depends on where you are in. Frankfurt is a bratwurst. But anyway, it's a wurst, a sausage. And then you have curry ketchup on top or ketchup with like curry. whatever yeah powder sprinkled powder curry right so i get a package in the mail and i don't think it had a return address i don't know what the fuck it was it just says ketchup which means spiced ketchup brand brand
Spiced tomato, do you see this? Tom Auto. Oh, Tom, but Auto, tomato is spelled A-U-T-O. Yes, condiment. Condiment. With Volkswagen logos on it. What in the shit is this? And then I opened it up. Of course I'm giggling. while this is happening. It's probably a bomb given the terrible things I've said about different Volkswagens through the years.
Yeah, especially their efforts to convert to EV. Yes, exactly. It is, for those of you watching at home, you can see this, a box with a beautiful Volkswagen Gewürzketchup brand, spiced tomato condiment. A t-shirt that says, tomato, tomato. A key chain of a red Jetta that's made to look like a tomato. And a little information.
piece of information. It's too dark. I can't read it. Can you read this? It's just a Volkswagen logo. So what is this paper thing? You're going to read this for the very first time. This lighting is dramatic in this new studio, but I can't read anything. The lid's off thanks to Jamie Orr, a Volkswagen enthusiast, self-confessed car nerd, with a deep love for Fave OTL catalog part 00010Z. It is not made with any metal, carbon fiber, leather, or rubber, but it's got tomatoes in it.
It's Volksarten Gewürzketchup brand, the condiment brought to you by a car company. Beloved by Germans, but little known to Americans, or at least it was until now. The VW part from the German catalog just happened to be a condiment. Tomato, Tom Auto. Okay. Does it say, hold on, does it say not for sale in the U.S.?
Not sold in the U.S. Interesting. Not sold in the U.S., but it's labeled and written in English. Yes, in fluid ounces. I don't know how to use those things. I think this is quite funny. I was hoping there would be a sausage inside. Well, I don't know if they should be mailing sausages from Germany. But anyway, I'm now unboxing. Is that some kind of code for something? Shut up. Yeah, this is all in English.
Water, tomato paste, sugar. And it's labeled for a U.S. sale, right? It's got the nutrition facts on it as required. So it's labeled for U.S. consumption or marketing. I think what happened, so Jamie Orr, do you know Jamie? Jamie is, he's... based in Pensiltucky, actually technically at Pensiltucky because he's pretty close to Philly, Pennsylvania, Pensiltucky is sort of like.
you know, central PA and Western PA. He's based in Pennsylvania and he restores and modifies and does really cool shit with old Volkswagens. Has earned himself quite- deservedly so, a huge following in the VW community for just building outrageous shit. Like I was in there once, I met him once, super cool guy and he had, I feel like it was a VR6.
powered city golf or city polo or some stupid shit. Like it was just awesome stuff, but he's got like a rally golf and he's got amazing cars. And so he had been talking about, about curry ketchup. Which by the way, you can get in any grocery store in Germany. Like there's ketchup and then curry. Yeah, not Volkswagen. Not Volkswagen branded. So clearly he has partnered with Volkswagen to add that part number to the dealer. I wonder if you can get that.
just put in that part number at the dealer and they'll just give you a bottle of ketchup. It'd be amazing if those fuckers could give me a key for like a key blank or brake pads or rotors or any of the other parts I actually, or brake fluid master cylinder. Reservoir for your cabbie. So, hey, anyone listening from Volkswagen Classic, thank you so very much. I assume they sent this to me. Thank you so much very much for this. What's ketchup? Could I have a...
brake fluid reservoir, please, for the car that says Volkswagen on it also? Thank you. Is that bitchy? Am I being like a malcontent gift receiver? Like, thank you for what I didn't order, but I want to... Something else instead? I mean, I... There are many, I think, shortcomings about support for old cars, you know? Like...
That SL, for example, arrived to me without the infrared remote. This is an early phase of keyless entry, but in the old days, when Mercedes first started doing keyless entry, you had a remote that wasn't radio, but it was through line of sight through...
IR for infrared, which I think Peugeot experimented with this also and put the sensor on the inside of the mirrors. But the problem was that if it was really sunny out, the sensor wouldn't work because it was being overwhelmed by infrared light from the ambient environment. The Mercedes system, I think, always works, but the keys have been NLA, no longer available for ages and ages, and so the IR locking system in this card is useless because I don't have...
an IR key, and I think the IR system just doesn't work. But anyway, you used to have to point the key at the car, like a TV remote. Yeah, at the door handle or the trunk lid. Mine worked on my 129. My first two 129s, it also worked. I love the little flashy light that's built in. There's a red one and a green one based on whether you're locking or unlocking. So good.
In the United States, the system was only available on 129s, but in other markets, you could get it. Oh, it was also, I think, maybe potentially available on 140s. Yeah. I've never owned an early 140. i believe it was yeah that makes sense um but uh in europe you could get it on 124s which was never available in the united states so my wagon actually has infrared locking sorry i think my backpack's decompensating um
I think that's very cool, but you can't get... You can't get... The keys have been NLA, and then in 97, they did a 97-only key, and if you read the comment section of a 140, that's a 90, or any 97 Mercedes, that's a high-trim, you know... nearly a hundred thousand dollar car then people are always like oh the 97 only key blah blah anyway there's support around the the keys of the cars from 20 years ago despite mercedes having really allegedly very good
Classic support. And BMW Classic is actually really good, but I can't get a key for the 850 CSI. The key blank? The key, the remote. So I can get an aftermarket case. Yes. That looks right, but the innards that actually transmits can't get at all. And I think I can get a key point. That's exactly the same problem. Annoying. But VW has stopped the production of the 16-valve keys forever ago. The aftermarket has now picked it up. You can now get...
It's a pill key. It's a different looking key, whatever. Bubble. But we're here to bitch about different types of Volkswagens. Other Volkswagen. Okay, so this episode is about the ID buzz. So if you're listening on Monday, October 21st and nothing happened, that would derail this because you never know. The embargo date for ID Buzz drives is today, so you're going to see a lot of content. For the US. For the US, yeah.
Because I was shocked to find that after we filmed this in whatever it was, August or something, I immediately went to England and then just saw them circulating in the wild there, like as regular old cars. Short wheelbase. Oh. Yeah. I had never seen one in person. So this was a really cool thing. Volkswagen called me and said, hey, we've got a buzz. Are you still interested in doing something about it? Because years ago, I begged, please, please, please.
And so the answer was yes, we rearranged the schedule. It was the week after Monterey Car Week, which was a fucking nightmare to go from one thing to the next. But we... You don't turn down an opportunity like this, right? I really appreciate it. Joking aside about everything, you know, the ketchup is a cute gift. I think it came from VW. I don't even know. They probably knew you were in edit and wanted to lubricate the edit with ketchup.
But, you know, you get an early exclusive on a car. It wasn't an exclusive. I'm sure other outlets had it too. We'll find out on 21st. but or today we'll find out today because we didn't pre-record this yeah well also you got a longer lead time because you've made it clear to them and they've actually understood that to make the type of content you make you need more than you know a week of it's not like a
So back in the day, there were what the car companies called long lead press launches. And so a long lead means a long period of time between you driving the car and when that story comes out. And they were typically up to three months. because it would get a magazine into print and get it through editorial and we would be able to at automobile we were pretty good at being able to like hold pages and sneak stuff in so I remember it was Aston Martin repeat
I was in Valencia, which is the correct pronunciation. I was in Valencia, and I drove the car, and my boss had them. I had to, whoever it was, extend my hotel room by a day and a half because I had to sit. I did not have time to fly home. So I had to sit in the hotel and write the whole story and then ship it to him because they were holding the magazine. And so it was probably three weeks from the time I submitted that story until it was done printing. And then three and a half weeks.
until people started seeing the story. But typically we got a month, two or three. And then there were shortly, when the internet came around, there were shortly, and those were all done under embargo. So it was agreed, this was for publication on your October issue.
Right. Of course, October came out September 1st and that was just the whole like, you know, 9.99 instead of 10 bucks kind of same bullshit. But then when the internet came around, they sort of invented the short lead and the short lead was there for, you know, for digital. So the idea being that if the embargo date was like today, October 21st, everyone had had an opportunity to give their medium enough time to produce that content and distribute it.
That has all gone away. No one does any long leads anymore. It's, you know, there will be sort of medium and short lead stuff where there's an embargo and that's so that everyone can get through the car. It's not like, you know, I drive the car on a Monday and my story is published Monday night if I make some.
bang out some shitty story. And then you don't even get into it until Tuesday. That's not fair to you. So embargoes are there to make it fair to everyone. So worldwide, everyone can publish on the same day. And often there are a month worth of press. What the fuck is the term? Oh, we had lunch. I'm dumb.
This is the post-lunch sugar thing. Loans? No, a month worth of rounds of like tranches of media coming in. So like, you know, Audi will do something in Sardinia and it's a program that lasts a full month. Waves. So there'll be...
You know, the first wave is an American wave, second wave is an American wave, third is Canadian, fourth is German, fifth is French, whatever, blah, blah, blah. They will divide it by country so that we're with our own people and they can bring the appropriate engineers and distribution people and marketing from each one of those. And so you have a one month length of time and then everyone gets to publish on the same day. Really fair thing. But no one needs a long lead anymore.
Except me. And I sort of, I keep talking to all the car companies. I'm like, just think of this as a long lead. And they're like, oh, I get it. Because Icons is a fully scripted television show, effectively. And we can't do it in three days or two days. We typically take about a month of pre-production.
And that means organizing the cars, getting locations. We close roads, get permits, get cops for what's called intermittent traffic control. So shutting the roads down and letting cars through only one by one. It's a major production.
That's a California thing, by the way. Like we don't have a choice. You can't just film here without a permit. And so, you know, getting the racetrack, getting all the supporting character of cars and then getting our crew rubbed up and everything takes about a month. And I have to go and research and write the script.
And then we film for four days, three, four, five days, whatever it is. And then Rob sits in a dark office and cries for a month to get it out, to edit the whole piece. So the whole thing is. two months minimum. And so Volkswagen gave me this car early and I certainly wasn't going to turn on the opportunity. My question was, and this was an interesting one that Anthony and I discussed, if it's embargo day,
why are we going to be different? How are we going to be different? Like everyone has a megaphone in this world. And now all of these other journalists and all these other outlets have had the same car. How do we do something different? And so. The decision was, let's do something no one would ever do. Let's get 14 cars to shoot all in the same spot. You do this to yourself. It was way more than 14.
A car broke, one dropped out, we canceled the last second. I mean, Jake is probably shaking over there if I ask him this question, but I don't even know how many cars we actually had lined up. the premise of the icons wasn't just a granular review, like, look at this quirk and feature. Sorry, sorry, Doug. Wow. No, but it wasn't that type of review. It was not a granular thing for-
Two reasons. Number one, that would be competing with everyone else. And number two, I had to write most of the script before I got there. And I'd never seen a buzz in person, right? So we can leave blanks, right? I can leave. blanks for impressions about the car and i certainly do i don't presuppose any of that stuff so i have to leave for the review section blanks but there are things i know i know horsepower i know
effect of zero to 60 or claimed zero to 60, right? And so we can start to make a structure, an outline, like a wireframe basically of the episode and then start filling stuff in. But I didn't want the sort of granular review of like storage spaces and ride quality and stuff to dominate the episode because I just wouldn't have time to do that. What we did instead was the sort of zoomed out big picture, which is that Volkswagen.
is in big financial trouble right now. Huge financial trouble. Their own CFO says they have one or two years, maybe, before they're bankrupt again. This has happened before. Didn't this happen in 1992? Yes. And it happened before that again. VWOA, Volkswagen of America, almost went out of business. So... If you look at Volkswagen's history, there have been three very clear, distinct chapters.
There was the air cool, they're all defined by the car's powertrain layout. There's the air cool chapter, the water cool chapter, and now the electric chapter. They are long ass chapters. Well, the air cool chapter was what, 1930 something through, you know, 70 something.
Effectively, right? 74 is when water-cooled starts. So Chiraco entered production in 74, golf in 75. And then- The Chiraco came out before the golf? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, see? Learn something every day. Probably for the image. you know, image reasons.
But then now we have the electric era. And I don't think most American listeners probably realize there's an ID.3, which was the first one, which is effectively an electric golf. ID.4, and that's the sort of like RAV4-sized SUV that's based on figure things. of electric Tiguan, ID5, ID6, ID7, ID7 Tour, and now IDBus, and there's a whole family of ID cars. Very much like- None of which we get, except for the ID4. Yes, and then we think about the first chapter.
There was a Beetle, there was a sport, Beetle Coupe, Beetle Convertible, Beetle Sports Car Coupe, Carmen Ghia, Beetle Sports Car Convertible, Carmen Ghia, Cabriolet, Thing, Squareback, Fastback, Notchback. bus, and then all of the other derivatives of bus. So you have an entire family of cars that share engine transmission layout. The same effect of car, right? Same thing happens with...
the beginning of chapter two, when you have the A1 platform cars, and that's Scirocco, Golf, Jetta, Cabriolet, pickup. What am I forgetting? Probably forgetting one of them. Anyway, and now, so this is the third time that Volkswagen's done this. And the third time that Volkswagen has thrown out everything that it knows about making a car, right? And making something wildly different. And it's-
basically gone bankrupt every time. My question for you is, I said it was a line in the script. In the 70s, did that happen? I didn't know that. Yeah, VWOA. Oh, VWA. Yeah. Is this before West whatever? It was in the midst. Oh, no, it was before Westmoreland. Well, it was before and during the construction of Westmoreland, which was VW's U.S. factory in Pennsylvania. And this was because the Beatle was formed.
Volkswagen was not expected to make it because it just didn't have enough product. Squareback, Fastback, Notchback were the sort of solution to this problem and they didn't work. Wasn't peak Volkswagen US sales like 1970 or something? And it was like 500 and something thousand units and they've never... Never hit that again. Hit that again. It was 469 something. It was almost 500,000 units. But within seven or so years, they were down to...
a fraction of that, like 50,000, it was bad. No, I might be thinking about the 1993 bankruptcy because they went from 400- Wrong bankruptcy. Yeah, they went from 400 to 48. I think it was. Don't quote me on the numbers. They're all in the episode. But yeah, you know, I don't know of, my question for you that I started to say was, has there been another car company that has once succeeded?
in throwing out everything it knows and stands for and doing something completely different. Really curious about this. I should have probably asked you this in advance so you could study this. I feel like that happens with like Chrysler K car. Was that, that is a new, okay, it was front wheel drive, but the Chrysler had had front wheel drive cars prior to that, right? It was, that was a new platform, but Chrysler didn't. And they made a van out of it too. They did.
But my, like, for example, Cadillac. Cadillac was old man floating machines. They became E46 sports sedan company plus. Excuse me, plus Escalade. Yes. Have they succeeded? I would say no. Probably not, yeah. I would say they've succeeded mostly in Escalade, which is probably the closest thing to the 5,000-pound boats, soft boats that they used to have. I can't, I mean, BMW is in there in the midst of this right now, sort of trying to kill itself. But I don't know.
Put it this way, I couldn't think of another company that's ever succeeded in just throwing, I mean, what did Volkswagen stand for? It was the people's car, right, technically. But every Volkswagen had a flat engine. mounted longitudinally in the rear of the car with four cylinders that was air-cooled. Yeah, but that's because they only made one product.
And so then they replace it with another one product. But it wasn't just a different product. It was air-cooled went water-cooled, longitudinal went transverse, rear-drive went front-drive, rear-engine went front-engine. They literally changed all of the fundamentals of... of what defined that car from an engineering perspective.
Yeah, and instead the mission remained the same, which was that it was the new way of making a car that was sensible and affordable and could be sold in large numbers. But this was an almost reactionary response. It wasn't quite reactionary. Well, kind of. Mini came out in 1959. You made me there. And the transition to front wheel, the Fiat 120, I think it was 7, also was trans... There was some Fiat that was a 120-something that was the first...
Transverse, you know. And Lancia had been making small front-wheel drive, admittedly longitudinal cars, for a while. So it was a sort of... They said, what is the mission that we're trying to do rather than how are we doing this same mission? And they say, what is the best state of the art thinking about how to solve that problem?
But they then threw everything out. I mean, they were willing to throw it all out. Which Porsche tried to do and then it didn't stick too well. And then they smartly sort of reverted when they realized that they were...
I don't know, losing, they were disposing of everything that meant, that would matter to them. And I think the difference there is that Porsche buyers are after a certain experience and texture and that it's a sort of almost subjective type of motoring, whereas Volkswagen buyers...
I like however the best mousetrap comes to be made and like whatever, as long as it gets me from here to there. I see your point, but I say from, I don't think I've ever seen anyone change anything from an engineering standpoint and have it stick. Yeah. I'm just ruminating on this subject. I mean, sort of everyone transitioned from rear wheel drive to front wheel drive after the Mini sort of invented that layout. But Volkswagen was a wholesale, just rethink. Anyway, that's-
This discussion is how... Yeah, I mean, Fiat did that, like the Cinquecent... Well, those were... They were front engine, then they were rear engine, and then they were front engine, front wheel drive, transverse, and... And it was one car. Volkswagen had an entire family of cars. A full-line auto manufacturer, if you will. If you think of the thing as an SUV, and the bus as a minivan, and then coupes, convertibles, sports cars, sedans, they had it all.
They did everything. Not that many companies built such a complete product line. So I found that whole thing interesting. So rather than doing a nuts and bolts sort of, you know, very close look. comparison or yeah icons episode we just went completely the other way and i'm really curious to see how this does so we had originally got every one and it's certainly more in keeping with the spirit of what icons is supposed to be i hope so
I don't know. This is, I mean, this is a step further than we've ever gone before. Like, so Mustang, we had all of, you know, the generations of Mustangs. It was a lot of cars. This was just a shit ton of cars to each use as a prop to tell a story, right? You did that with the Piekasot also. Yes.
Which wasn't even about a car. It was about a human. Correct. Yeah. The human was the icon. So this one, I am really curious to see how it does, but you drove Buzz, right? Did you drive? I think so. No, maybe not. I drove the ID. Four. And well, hold on. So, all right. So we had, we've, you and I have already talked in this episode about the fact that we drove that beautiful black beetle. Yes. And this is why, right? I don't think we admitted.
Yes, I think that's right. The Beetle was charming. It charmed the pants off of everyone. The bus was just so gorgeous and so terrifying. The old bus. The old bus. Just what a beautiful piece of machinery. Much zippier than the other old bus I've driven.
That thing was genuinely snappy. So the drag race did not turn out the way I thought the drag race was going to turn around. So we did drag race in the episode and I shouldn't give all the way the secrets, but- give away all the secrets but uh we drag raced a bus against what we thought was probably the closest to it in a quarter mile which was a bicyclist um and then for shits and giggles we put a scooter on there
And when the bus was in its sort of heyday, the Mura was invented, the Lamborghini Mura was invented. And I sort of started looking at the numbers and thought, all right, let's get the buzz to race the Mura. Because I just want to see. And on paper, they looked like they were going to be fairly close. In reality. Well, spoiler alert, the fucking bus that we had was really healthy. It was. The buzz. So no, the bus. The bus was healthy and the buzz was healthy. The bus did 52 in the quarter mile.
without a hard clutch dump i mean we had we had props all over the table in the back it was converted to sort of like a camper and everything went flying which was hilarious that was exactly what i hoped for but i did not i was not about to do a magazine style redline clutch dump which would be the way to do that on that
thing um and it still managed 52 miles an hour and the quarter mile into a headwind at willow springs that was that's a spicy bus yeah and we like compared it to the beetle also which should by all accounts be Quite a bit faster since they're mechanically comparable and it weighs a lot less and has a lot less frontal area. And the beetle was slower. The beetle was slower than the bus. So we had a...
Yeah, we had an unusually zippy bus. Right, which was still... And I've driven, you know, other buses, and it was by far the snappiest bus I have ever driven. And let's be honest here, 52 and a quarter mile, we're not talking about it.
fast car no no no but i mean the other ones normally like they're in the they're in the realm of like a citroen du chevaux where you're like i'm not entirely sure whether i'm accelerating so i'm going to consult the speedometer which ends at 60 miles an hour to see whether i'm actually accelerating because i haven't
no somatic sensation from my body that the speed is changing. So I have to consult the gauge to see whether it's moving. This thing did 60 no problem. It was terrifying to do that. Yeah, it was quite performant for one of those. So it did get beaten by the bike.
for a while. The bicyclist. Bicyclist. Yes. Which was fucking that bicyclist. He was the coolest guy. He was extremely enthusiastic. I mean, it was like a hundred degrees and he was like, nope, I'll run again. No, I'll get you. Of course, Anthony, that slave driver is like, all right, everyone back to Z. And I'm like, you know, we ride a quarter mile. This guy's got to ride a quarter mile back. We have to stage all the cars and he's got to go for it again. What up?
fucking trooper he was i mean like i think of it as being hard on cars but like as a human hero who's bicycling as fast as he can for a quarter mile while in potentially inhaling the fumes from various oh yeah uncatalyzed v-box shoved in his pants because I'm like, I need to get numbers on this. So he did 28 and he sort of got to 28 miles an hour. I don't remember how quick it was.
very quickly and then stayed there. Once it was clipped in, yeah. Yeah, that's true. We had to clip in. The bus passed him. I drove the bus for that race. I was midway through third gear. So I was 35 miles an hour. I flew by him at seven miles an hour. And then it showed 50 on the speedometer at the ending line, which was 52 GPS. That was fucking hilarious. It was exactly what I wanted to happen. Although we genuinely thought there was a chance that the bike-
the bicyclist would have beaten the bus the entire way through. That didn't happen. We had a spicy bus. And then we didn't know what the hell to expect of the scooter, but we knew it was going to get the jump off the line. I didn't know this thing was going to do a rolling burnout off the line, which was- So cool to watch back. I didn't watch it. And in real life, I couldn't see it. I was too busy driving a bus. And you were driving the Miura. Yes. Which, I mean, the noise that thing made.
The fact that he's starting with noise is an indication of sorts. Ah, okay. Look, we know what the mirror did in period. Right. Magazine road test. Would you like to look into that camera? Is it there? There. And tell these people what a mirror transmission and engine probably cost? 200, maybe $250,000. Is that bad? I think so, yeah. I was hoping it was, holy shit. All right, you're an idiot for showing up in your mirror.
But there is no fucking way anyone is doing an 8,000 RPM clutch dump in a transverse mid-engine car clutch dump. That's the only configuration of cars, that four-wheel drive mostly, that I will not do a clutch dump because you're- you know, typically that transverse layout is from a front-wheel drive car, which is limited in the amount of force on it by the fact that you have no traction. And then just move to the back of a car where you have plenty of traction, so shit breaks.
There is no way we were asking you to do that. So my advice to you was get the car off the line judiciously. Move it, move out quickly, which you did. Yeah, that thing just... It is intended to carbureate when the throttle openings are large, and that sort of transition from part to full throttle, it does very reluctantly and on its own pace. And so I think that, you know, had it been... The other thing that we do in that car, I should note, is that it...
Because of the common risk of fire in those cars, you set the float bowl level of the fuel inside the carburetors a little bit lower than you would actually ideally like because the reason why those things catch on fire is that the fuel overflows from the float bowls. onto the hot engine and then it catches on fire. So that car we purposely have set up to be a little bit conservative on floatable levels. Anyway, this is all a bunch of excuse making for why the Miro was slow. No, it didn't. 87.
In the quarter mile. Yeah. Which, by the way, for the record, you've dynoed that engine when it was out of the car. Yes, and it made 326 horsepower. So it is exactly as... yeah and that's a real number you know lamborghini quoted them at 350 or 370 horsepower variously without ever
changing anything yes yeah um and that was also gross so i would say you got a healthy engine i don't want anyone to look away look at that video and be like oh that lamborghini listen i would have never gotten that car to move that quickly um knowing the value
of all those components and just the fragility of all of that. No, it did well. It did fine. It was 15... It just doesn't like part throttle in it. There's quite some time before it will accept full throttle in this sort of transition off the line. It's mostly not, I don't, I just watched a cut. I haven't seen, the video's not done yet, it's being edited as we speak. But I don't remember really hearing, in person I could hear it breaking up.
Once that thing fucking lit up, the noise it made was just- That's what it's for. Oh my God. That is what the car is for. A wall of fucking noise. It's unbelievable. And despite my best efforts to do the speediest gear changes that were polite, there's a lot of time lost in the gear changes also.
Yeah, because you're not. I was double clutching. Right, exactly. Because the fastest way to get that car to shift is to double clutch it. No, it's not. I mean, the fastest way to get it to shift without. grinding the shit out of those, yeah. And that's the thing, that's the difference between a magazine Tesla. When we test a car, we do terrible shit to it. The other Volkswagen, and you sort of hinted at this, that was far more performant than it was supposed to be. No, no, I shouldn't say that.
than we expected was the buzz. Yes. I had been given preliminary specs from Volkswagen that estimated a six second flat, zero to 60. which I thought sounded slow. It is 1,300 pounds more than an ID.4 with the same powertrain. And that does like- And what would have been on par with what a very spicily driven Miura could have achieved once when it was new. Yeah, exactly.
And so that's what we thought. Before breaking. So we thought, all right, so the Mura did, back in the day, a six second zero to 60, just. under i think this this will be around six seconds derek will probably get a six and a half out of the car or 6.8 or something like that and then the the Volkswagen will start to slow down at high speed. So through the quarter mile, there's a chance, which is what we always want, that these two cars will cross together. In reality, this buzz...
fucked right off. It was 5.4 to 60. And by the way, that was into the headwind. I didn't do my normal full testing battery because this was not an Ultimate Drag Race replay. We just did, I just put a V box in it. I don't even know where the battery state of charge was. I think it was. like low 90s and it ripped off a 5.4 and just fucked right off and left everyone for dead. That was what a race. That was so fun. It was very absurd. It was so stupid. It was totally absurd.
um so that's just to show the progress of you know basically that that what we thought was going into this was that you know the new bus is as fast as the fastest car in the world was when it was new. When it's, in fact, considerably faster. Like, not even close. Yeah. They were two seconds apart at the quarter mile. Really? Yeah. On your best run. Probably catching up. There were...
No, no, the buzz was 90. Isn't it limited? Yeah, the buzz was about to hit its limiter. You would have flown by, you know, at the three quarter mile mark or something. Your fastest run, they were- which is the V-Box run, where they were two seconds apart. You're like, there are different, the car was stumbling, right? So you were, first of all,
You're getting it offline gently, and then it was stumbling, sometimes worse than others, as you said, at its own pace. There was one finish line shot where I think it's like four and a half seconds difference, but who knows what happened on the launch, because that's a finish line shot, so whatever. Not an Ultimate Drag Race replay. There to show a march of progress. Relative performance, yes. But yeah, so the episode was right. We didn't get to drive the Carmen Ghia.
which I'd never realized had the key on the left Porsche 911 style. I didn't know that either. I've never driven a common Kia. Me neither. I don't think I've ever even sat in one. I have now sat in one. I sat in one as a kid. My mom's friend had one, but that's all I remember. But I sat in this one.
I sat and I drove the thing and then promptly almost got it stuck on the beach thinking they were four-wheel drive. Oh, no, they're not. Yeah, well, the Kubewagen was and I thought, okay, it's a Kubewagen. Same shit. No. Yeah. Oops. That's this VW combining all of the ingredients over and over again, as usual. Yeah. But, you know, oops. So that came close to getting stuck. There was no production version of the Beetle that was sold to the public with four-wheel drive, to my knowledge.
Maybe there's something esoteric that I don't know of. Schwimmwagen? Are those four-wheel drive? Well, those weren't sold to the public really either. And then I didn't get a transit to drive. The only fuel-injected car of the original air-cooled era was...
the square back. And of course, because the fuel injected, it broke. So it didn't start. So I was asked not to try. So I didn't. Those cars came from Volkswagen. That was the coolest thing is they, they offered, the bus was a private owner. Super cool guy. It was like half at it.
the new beetle was also I wasn't going to mention that but yes there was a new beetle there for reasons that we're not going to get into but there was definitely a new beetle there in fact there were two of them if you remember were you there for this? No I only saw the one the early one The red one. Oh, there was a black one there, which was the car that made the production car debut in Detroit in 99. And it's signed by people that came to the car show.
VW, let everyone sign it. So they were like, we can bring that out. And I was like, fuck yes. So yeah, so the red new Beetle was privately owned, a friend of our producers. And, but all the other old cars were, VW brought that GTI. So they brought a Mark 1 GTI for us. And I also, so this is where we get out of control. I'm like, well, if I have one of every body style Mark 1 of. type one, I need to have every A1, which means Scirocco, Golf, Jetta, pickup, cabriolet. And the Scirocco broke.
No, Scirocco didn't break. It was the square rack that broke. Scirocco was being used for something else. The Jetta needed to be on the East Coast. These were Volkswagen classic cars. So I'm like, you know what? Just give me one. Just give me a GTI. And then so we'll have something that makes a lot of noise. It rips her on a back road. So we'll have some action in the episode. And then, obviously, we have the Buzz and an ID.4. And those cars are the same.
sort of idea platform sharing, same related stuff, the same powertrain, but the bus is a lot bigger and heavier. What'd you think of the ID.4? Did you drive it like a lot? I rode a couple laps on the track when we were doing formation work, I think, if I remember correctly. Okay, so you didn't get to drive it in between locations? No, no. I don't know. It was innocuous enough. It seemed fine.
As a driving experience, it was pleasant. As a driving experience, it's quite nice, actually. You know, it's everything that Volkswagen knows about suspension tuning, and so it's fine. It rides well. Pretty quiet inside. It's quick. It's 4'8 to 60 without that extra weight. It sort of drives like a car. Yeah. So does the buzz. And so now I can finally talk about that. Yeah, we spent some time riding around in it. We took it to the house and back. It's a really nice little car. I love minivans.
And I really wish we had gotten a chance to take a picture of it next to Vangina. We had Vangina and Vanna White. So Vanna White is a catch-all name for our rental enterprise. which is usually white. So we have Vangina and Vanna White. I would love to have those three cars together. So a Pacifica, a Grand Caravan and-
and the Buzz, but we didn't. It's shorter. So the Buzz is shorter than the traditional minivans. It's taller, but the floor is a lot higher also because of the batteries. And the first thing I notice is like, okay, it doesn't have the...
Cargo capacity. Internal volume, yeah. But on the other hand, the structure is so much stiffer. The problem with minivans is you have this sort of fuselage shape. With a gigantic- aperture or two in it or multiple right to the side apertures and then the back aperture so you have no torsional strength um it's a pacifica like that too i've never it's better than the caravan and it was because they had to re-engineer i assume it's because they re-engineered the entire car for five
or crash safety, which the caravan did not get. I'm close. It does have seats that fold flat completely into the floor. They're amazing. The thing is amazing.
Just not in a crash. But yeah, the structure of the ID Buzz is really good. Really solid. It's very quiet inside. There's not a lot of noise. Like driving into a 40 mile an hour headwind was the only time where I'm like, is this thing a lot of... wind noise and then I turned left and I was like oh it's side noise and then I turned left again I'm like is that tailgate whistling you know it's just so that's like the equivalent of if you're traveling 60 miles an hour it's like going 100 yeah
In that direction, because I had to sadly drive the bus back to our Airbnb with the whole crew that night in the dark, and there were 40, 50, 60 mile an hour winds over there most nights. I have no idea. And 36 horsepower. I think that one might have been 50. That might have had to explain it. But it was 45. It was all I was really willing to do because, well.
Into the headwind, 45 was all I was willing to do because I'm not going full throttle. That was probably three quarters and that was enough. I don't want to damage someone's car. Sidewinds, when I made the left, because everything's on a sort of north, south, east, west grid, I was doing about 38, 40. Scared.
to death yep i mean that car was that is not an exaggeration that's how those things are I mean, in the dark at night, I had two modern cars surrounding me, one in front, one behind, and I insisted on that because I wanted a layer of protection and to use their headlights. I think possibly the most terrifying car I've ever driven on a public road. And part of that is...
Part of it is it's got a complete lack of directional stability, right? Number one, you can probably have 40, 50 degrees of steering play just to keep sort of in the lane, even without significant crosswinds. And then there's the whole swing axle thing, which I think we talked about. We did talk about this. Yeah. As soon as you get a little bit of side loading, the wheels tuck in and turn you more and you're like, oh, fuck out. It's just. Yeah.
Horrifying. This is why I prefer 356s to Beatles. Apparently Beatles all got rid of the swing axle and got independent rear a couple years later. I did not realize that there were two different- Swing axle is kind of independent. Yes, but got a different independent suspension. I have to look this up. Somebody will correct me. But I was told that. I'm like, really, what? And I didn't get a chance to look into it.
but apparently later beetles are far less sketchy than that one was um although i'd have that one because it was so beautiful who cares you die in style and you can bolt the new you can update to suspension probably because it's all beetles um but Oh, the other defining characteristic of why the bus is so scary is your knee is the crumple zone. Oh, yes. And I mean, so as you're sitting in this like-
bus driving position, you have like a wart on the inside of what looks like would be the firewall of the lower dash basically. And that wart is to make clearance for the bulb of the headlight. Like it is. genuinely scary. I don't know how anyone survived driving those things. Well, spatially efficient. Spatially efficient.
which is less so the case with the with the buzz yes there was a big distance like you feel like there's a lot of space in front of you and you're like what is occupying that space because you can't access it right there's no again there's a yeah it's a little trunk that opens up but typically as typical with this platform
My problem with MEB, which is Volkswagen's electric platform, is they didn't engineer it for a frunk. And so you open that up and you have- Why? Who is like, we're not going to engineer this for a frunk? The traditional- Car companies right now are very much like GM or the American car companies were in the 80s where they just didn't do anything unless they were forced to do it and everything was good enough and it was just overrun with- Mediocrity.
Less mediocrity, although that's there, but also inefficient. corporate structure. So what happens is every department works in its own silo and they package protect, meaning they leave space for whatever component they want. And somebody allowed- the brake department to package protect for a master cylinder there. And, you know, and they sort of have tolerance as an area in every direction. And what-
you open the hood thing of that little flap on that thing. And you realize if you aggregated all of the space that's in between all these different components, you could have a frunk.
There's not a lot. Look at how small the front overhang is on that car. It's not that big. But it's really- The dashboard's very long though. The windshield's extremely far away. It's extremely long. But you look at the idea, it's the same, it's a 94, right? So they had to get the- driver that far back sure um because that's so when you design a platform you design for the uh it's dash to axle basically and which means basically everything from the driver's ass to that front
axle is fixed in dimension. And I would assume, I don't know for sure, that Buzz and ID4 have the same exact dash to axle. um same sort of seat point to front so your crush space is the same your airbag is the same your steering column is the same more similar right and they do this for engineering cost savings
And so you just have to make the buzz fucking huge to make those proportions work. And then you have this weird dash where basically the dash is so big that the front row passengers are where the second row passengers basically would be. But yeah, it's sort of like irritating that you open up that up and you can look and you say, especially on ID4. ID4 has more than enough room for a trunk, for a frunk.
But there was no God sitting above all of those other, and by that I mean deity, and by that I mean piech, sitting above all of those departments saying, you guys are idiots. move your shit to the sides like the way Lucid has done, or even Tesla did to a less effective measure. But a frunk is a really nice thing to have in a vehicle that doesn't have a lockable trunk.
And so you and I just had a conversation actually about art. No, it wasn't you. It was a friend of mine. My e-golf got broken into in the city of San Francisco. And I have- I never keep anything in the trunk of the car, ever. San Francisco is very well known for its break-ins, and I'm sure the sort of-
Right wing media has continued to point out that like San Francisco is a total shithole wherever cars get broken into five times a day. I've lived in San Francisco for almost 16 years and this is the first time I've had any incident. So, okay. I've had one also. In how many years? 92? 2000, well... 1892 to you. In, what are we at now? 14 years. So what they did was they smashed the little quarter window. Yes, that's exactly what happened to me.
My Mark 7. And then they fold the seat down to see if there's anything in the truck. Okay, so your Mark 7 got it, my Mark 7 it, and our friend Alden's Mark 7 just got it. So that's who I was just talking to. Yeah, so what you do is you have to take the luggage space cover off so they can see in there that there's nothing in there. Oh, I just now fold the seat down. Oh yeah, that works too. I just fold the seat down.
These assholes did $600 worth of damage to my car for nothing. And so I just fold the seat down as if to say, fuck you. But I really enjoy when I'm in the city with a friend's Tesla. Because I just, and by the way, no sedan is immune from this. It's not like your central locking system stops the seats from being folded down. So everyone's cars just get broken into. Whatever's in the trunk, there's now.
frunk they're not getting in so i love the ability to put stuff in a frunk and it's just as one of these little added benefits from a daily usability can't you i guess the only way you can open the frunk on these cars is to have the thing boot up and then push a button on the screen or there was some of them had an emergency
release that if you pull part like a bumper cover off there's a release inside but i've never heard of and please i don't i hope this isn't i'm not giving this away to any thieves i've never heard of anyone's Frunk being broken into, not once. Because, you know, the thieves are opportunistic and they need to be there quick. Bam, smash a window, look in, grab, and you're out. Versus crouch down, reach underneath, pull a thing off, whatever.
But yeah, I would really love a frunk. And if my golf had a frunk, it would be even more perfect. And so I really, that upsets me a lot in the- Yeah, it's leaving on the table. I mean, that's one of the things that-
Like when the Model S first came out, I was absolutely mind boggled by the fact that the car had front and rear trunks and you could potentially put seven people in it. I was like, how does this packaging even calculate? Wait until you see gravity. So Lucid Air is... obscene in its packaging and i just was able to
poke around into gravity and it's even, it invents its own cubic feet. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And so that's the benchmark. And so ID4, it's a problem. Buzz less so for two reasons. Number one, look at it right i mean it's got to be it has to be a slave to the way it looks and you don't judge
a new beetle the way you judge a golf in terms of usability, right? You don't judge a pair of high heels in the same way you judge running shoes, right? Because they serve different purposes. And number two, there's probably a reason that there was a number two and I don't remember what it was.
So there's that. Well, it's also box shapes. So you have certainly a larger internal volume, although it's quite a bit less internal volume than I would have in like Vangina, for example. And my Vangina is cavernous. We've discussed this. Yeah. Yeah, I bet we could fit. 1.7 times as much stuff in Vangina as we could in Abuzz.
But that thing is just... Well, yeah, and the way that the seats sort of function and package, or not package, the sort of mechanism, it's all very clever, and the sort of false floor that it has, which just reminds me of a Vanagon, of course, in the Vanagon, the engine's back there, but instead of like another...
storage space below, which is what the ID. But the Vanagon, like you couldn't pee on that. Like that false floor is so high that you couldn't pee on it. Where like the caravan for whatever reason. That false floor is so low you have to step down into it from the ground. Like I don't understand where the fucking seats go. I've had that car on a lift a million times. I don't know where the seats go. I wish Stellantis could make it.
Make it function in... No, the van works. The van's brilliant. But I just wish they would make other stuff as well thought out and then make that thing as well. Well, the seat team was probably like an A team because it's like really customer facing. I don't know. Yeah. It's a really practical thing. But all of this was really interesting going into this with the whole chapter idea. And then as I started to write the section where I review the car, I cut most of it out because I realized.
The best example I can give, I have a friend, she has twins who are now of, I think they're in like seventh grade. And when she was, she had a Z3. And when she was pregnant with twins, she's five foot zero. okay she was 101 pounds when she got pregnant
she couldn't reach the steering wheel anymore in her Z3 and had to stop driving. And the last time she drove it, she drove it to the dealer to trade it in for an Odyssey, a Honda Odyssey. Because I kept telling her, I'm like, it's not about you anymore. Your life is over. You are nothing but a milk donor. So fucking do what it takes. You're going to trust me. You are going to thank me. Buy a minivan.
She fought me, fought me, fought me, fought me, and then realized, like, this is just, I have to do something. I can't have a Z3. Like, this isn't gonna work. And so she cried her eyes out. She listened to her tell the stories. hilariously sad. She just cried for 35 minutes, handed over the keys, cried.
took her odyssey key put her head down got in it and drove home like and she's like i can reach the steering wheel and i can fit in it and fucking then she has the kids and she's like this shit's amazing because then they got a passat too and the first thing the kids did at like age two was swing the door open uh
from the Passat and dent the side of the Odyssey. And she was like, God, you were right about the fucking sliding doors. I can, in a rainstorm, she lives in Florida. She's like, I can hit the- the power door button, they slide open, the kids run in and I hit the button and it all takes three seconds and they don't destroy grandma's car or whoever's car's next door. And so, yes, she is now.
gonna buy a buzz and she has not asked me a single question about it it doesn't matter it doesn't it doesn't thank you for saying that well and it doesn't matter i was just going to you know talk about the experience when you get in it because i think You were saying that this is not true of all of them, but I think the way that they've done all the details in white is just like magical. Is that true of all of them or is it only some of them have that? To me that like...
I mean, I haven't seen the interior of the black interior one. Actually, the ID.4, when the launch edition was white and- It was like a two-tone white interior. It's just like beyond cool to have all the switches and the dashboard and the steering wheel all white. For me, I think it's a continuation of the retro aesthetic, right? Because it's something that you... It's a throwback to a different time when car companies would do...
different color steering wheel, dash topper, door panels, switches, seat belt buckles. I mean, the American car companies would do seat belts in color matching interior color.
And I think that's just like the coolest because it is so extraordinary and so different from, like, it just makes... really hammers home you know it's the it makes the effect that when you look at it you're like wow that's super cool it's very retro and then you get inside you're like whoa it like it's just so committed to the bit in a way that is so compelling and it
the thing that it does is the same thing that the new Beetle did when it was new, which is inspires like an emotional, like, I love this car reaction from people who are not car people. You haven't read the script or seen this episode, have you? No. Why? Well, either we're both weird or I nailed it in the script because that's why I brought the new Beatle. Because it was the same sort of thing. It elicited an emotional response. Yeah, I mean, I...
Our listeners who are too young to remember that because they were born after that it happened. But the experience of when the new Beatle came out was... unlike maybe anything else that I can specifically recall happening in the mainstream car world. Like it just got a whole entire population of humans excited about cars. The world stopped.
when that car dropped. And that's maybe a slight exaggeration, but it was called Concept One. It was the yellow one. Yeah, this is the one with the round mirrors. It was supposed to not... It almost didn't happen. It really only happened because Pieck sort of...
gave the okay at the very last second. But everyone wanted it dead and no one wanted that card. That was Freeman Thomas and Jay Mays in California doing this. Germany saying, absolutely not. We don't want to talk about our Nazi past. We don't want-
to talk about the beetle. We've moved forward. We don't, it's typical German thinking of we don't want to ever look back. And it was those guys made that thing. It was, that was the concept one was actually on a polo chassis. So the production car later became on golf.
Which was good for the US market. For engineering reasons, right? Because they needed to be bigger and then it had to be on an existing platform. But that happened really, that barely skated through. But that car wound up on the cover of not only every magazine. magazine but every non-car magazine every every newspaper worldwide it was like it people were crying over it yeah like
It's worth going back and reading the original magazine articles about it because the magazines, of course, get the car before it's publicly available. And I think it was probably Automobile magazine where someone is just describing the experience of... of driving around in that car and the way that it
And by the way, that was five years later, because the concept happened in 99, and didn't the production car- No, no, no, the production car came out in 98. In 94. Production car was 98 for a 99 model year, or whatever it was. But the concept was 94. Detroit, 94. So January- of 94 it was a long time later and even four years later people lost their minds yeah
I mean, just go back and find one of those articles, buy on eBay an issue of Automobile from whenever they did their first road test. But I remember the sort of, it just completely... consumed everyone's attention, regardless of whether they were into cars or not, because that is the nature of Volkswagen, that everyone had one. Everyone had a Beetle, and the Beetle left the US market in 1980. And so these people who remembered the original, I think, were still around. They were just, you know...
You know, instead of being 34, they were 52 or whatever. And so it was like right into the heart of the nostalgia. And now we look at them as sort of used old shitboxes that they sort of rehashed. twice which was maybe one time too many and i think it had a successful run i actually like the second gen it's more attractive proportionally and i think it is actually truer to the proportions of the original beetle because the windshield
is it's not symmetrical front to back, which the original was not. The interesting thing was watching. So, you know, I don't want to say I'm a VW fan boy, but my first automotive love was a Beatle. And then I wound up. falling into so i went from type one to a1 right both of both of vw's first chapters first car and That's the happenstance, right? My Scirocco has literally nothing to do with the beetle and it couldn't possibly be further away.
philosophically engineering wise and whatever else. So I guess I'm accidentally a VW fanboy. And Anthony always approaches me with that sort of critical eye when we're looking at scripts, when we're writing this stuff. And he's, you know, so there were plenty of times when I'm writing the script and he's like, you're being a little bit like.
fanboy you hear and i would push back and like no you're not and here's the here no i'm not and here's the empirical data showing you what and a lot of the things i talked about um were quantifiable and i could i could show him an article show him something um
When we were on location filming, he just kept coming over to me and saying, I almost cried by the way when we got the Beatle. I was so in love with that interior and that shape and the look and that black paint and that red interior and the whole thing that I just... I got like emotional about like, this thing is so beautiful. And I-
my first love was when I was 14. Like I bought a beetle when I was 14 and I bought it because it was 200 bucks and I split it with a friend and we each had put a hundred bucks in and it was a 72 super beetle. I've talked about this in the past. And I haven't been in one.
since i haven't driven a beetle on a public road other than once in my life with since i have a license right seriously i mean yeah and so i'm not familiar with these cars really i mean i am in theory in the history and whatever else but whatever and i and my car was a late car with a plastic dash and you know crap everything i got and this thing was just stunned at its beauty and stunned at like, it's just beautiful engineering. And so I was a little bit like.
emotionally charged, right? The bus, I've never even sat in a bus. It's beyond gorgeous. I could have just stared at that thing in its taupe dildo beige color for fucking days, right? And so I have all this happening and all this happening and Buzz is so cool to look at. Anthony finally came over to me day two and it was like, this is unbelievable.
everyone has a story about a Volkswagen. And I was like, so I'm glad to hear you just said something similar. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, everywhere we've gone, the tow truck guys, the car delivery people, the guys emptied out from the cafeteria for every one of the cars. for the GTI and the GTI brought people out of the woodwork. Everyone was coming over to us on a closed track where there's not supposed to be anyone around.
sneaking out of the woodwork. Oh my God, I had a Scirocco, I had a this, I had a Jetta, I had a square back, I had whatever. It's amazing that that car company is so ingrained in our culture that- I don't, to the point that I don't think anything else is. You could have like a 57 Chevy or a 70s. Mustangs, maybe. It's a certain type of person. That's only one car versus the whole lineup. So I think it's, yeah, I don't know.
That to me was, it was great to watch Anthony come to that. It is the people's car. I guess I'm a people. Yeah. Who knew? But the buzz was a, is a tough one because I. abhor that infotainment system yeah um it is and while i was watching the
the latest cut of the episode, I realized I shit on that UX, the whole interface. And that's not just the touchscreen, but it's the window switches with lack of window switches and all this other shit. I shit on it four times. And I'm like, I went through and I transcribed.
So I have the script and then I often have to update the script with what I actually said in location because it's not exact. And then in this case, all of the impressions for the car were not in the script. It was just blank pages and I just.
spoke, sort of wrote it on the spot and just rehearsed it a couple of times and recorded it. And I'm like, so I went through and transcribed everything I said and I'm like, okay, if this was a print article, would I have left this in four times? No, no way. Okay. So I go through and I read it all. I'm like, this is way too much. And I watched the whole clip back and I'm like, wait a second.
I should have shit on it six times. It's that bad. You know, it was stupid things. Like while I was driving, I drove the Buzz and the ID4 for quite some time on the public road. But the Buzz all the way from the racetrack to Malibu where we did the... We did the beach scenes. And it was two hours on the road and rush hour traffic in the morning. And the thing is just magic to drive. It rides very stiff.
Not very stiff, very stiff by minivan standards, but never, no matter what I hit, and I hit people, it never bottoms out. Like you never get a whack in the bump stop. genuinely brilliant suspension tuning with great body control in the corners. And that does not feel, it does not handle like it looks like it was 6,200 pounds. Right. And so that was like great. And I noticed some visibility problems.
made a lane change to someone, you know, it's kind of, you're way far back and it's a little bit awkward and the mirror is awkwardly placed. But it's just such a great car to be in and it's quick and it was efficient enough. And I was hypermiling because I didn't know if I was going to make it to the Charger and, you know.
I didn't know if the charger was gonna work because it's not Tesla. And I was going somewhere with this. Oh, the stereo is banging. It was so good. I was having the fucking time of my life. jamming singing and i had like great music playing whatever and then i had to use the fucking trip planner to to get directions to the the
charging station, and I wanted to use the trip planner because I genuinely didn't know if I was gonna make it on power. I made it there with like 34% battery. It wasn't even close, but I didn't know, right? I had a big hill to start out with, but I think we left.
It's like a 3,500 foot drop. So we left with not a lot of charge and I was able to regen the whole way down the hill. Whatever, long story. But I needed that trip planner to make sure that I was gonna make it. And I kept flipping back between it and Waze and Google Maps and whatever else just to see. And it was...
constantly lost. It never knew where the fuck I was. It never knew the fuck I was supposed to be going. It was telling me to make turns into a, like into a traffic jam when the other roads were all straight. It would have cost me like. literally 45 extra minutes on a two-hour journey. There were two map icons at the top of the screen. There was, oh God, I have them, I should have.
written right through my notes before. There were like so many core functions that were so unbelievably difficult to use that if I had actually pushed through, I would have crashed. trying to use them. And then, you know, then I get down to like sea level and I want to open the windows and just opening and closing the rear windows. So I have a little confession to make. I punched the window switch so hard that I broke it.
I guess that's a sign that it works beautifully. So there's the window switch is two switches, like it's the left and the right. And then directly forward of that, there is a light that says rear. And that light is hidden in a plastic bezel. Like you can sort of see it. It's there, but it's not illuminated, right? But it's not like a thing that says rear that lights up. It's a light that's not illuminated. So it's sort of like a gray spot.
And that has a capacitive area of touch on top of it. When you put your hand on the armrest, which is, or when you're driving, you are hitting that button and you don't realize it. And what I did not know is that if you hit... press and hold that button rear starts to flash and that means you're controlling all of the windows with the switches however if rear is illuminated you're controlling just the rears and if front is illuminated I could never, every time I put my hand down, I changed.
what i was controlling so i'm like in traffic in la rush hour traffic in the morning and i go to open a window and i open the wrong one and then i close the wrong one and then i put my hand there again and all of them open and all of them close and i was like are you and serious with this shit. And then every time I went to go press the button, it wouldn't react. You have to be in this one little area that you can't feel and then also can barely see.
Like I just, this rises to the level of like, I don't want anyone to buy this car out of spite because I want Volkswagen to fix this shit. It's got the same stupid slidey controls for the volume and the- and the heat temperature, they are now illuminated and they now work. Like bravo, that's wonderful, right? You can do cool things like if, think if it's
two fingers and a slide. There's like, there are codes in there. I don't remember what it was, one of the VW techs on site that was helping move cars around, explained it to me. He's like, oh, you know, if you do this, you can do that. Okay, great, wonderful. But the resolution is good enough that you can actually.
Oh, you can tap for a temperature up, whatever. That works. The window switches are a fucking abomination. The shifter is a fucking abomination. It is Volkswagen, BMW i3 from 15 years ago. rotary thing that you can't see from any position, no matter where you look. And then the gauge cluster doesn't have any customizability whatsoever. It shows nothing. It's a five inch, a four inch screen with a-
seven inch bezel on it. It's more bezel than it is green. And I just think, no wonder they lost $13 billion on the Cariad, which is the subsidiary that did all of this. So will Rivian make this all better? Yeah. That car with Rivian Electronics in it.
that buzz would be a perfect a perfect execution of what a buzz should be right now i don't want to call it a perfect minivan because it's style over function so you know if you really need a lot of storage space it's great the seats are comfortable
Even the second row seats, no one bitched about. I didn't sit them for a long period of time. There are power ports everywhere. There's storage things everywhere. It just works well as a minivan with slightly reduced storage. And it is smaller. Range is 231 miles. I mean, I think that's enough barely for most people to consider it. But again, my friend with the twins shouldn't give a shit. She doesn't care. And that's a difficult car to review when you have to point out to give a holistic view.
When you look like this, the line that I wrote, when you look like this, does anything else matter? Yeah. The problem, though, is what happened with the Beatle. I mean, I guess the Beatle probably paid for itself, but eventually people were like, okay, I'm a little bit over this, and, like, the novelties worn off, and then it sort of got sunsetted, and now they just still make the golf. The golf was there before, the golf was there during, the golf's thereafter, right?
it has staying power where this is a sort of I don't know nostalgia grab which is fine I mean if you get people to have an emotional reaction to a car of some kind then I think it's well worth doing here's the question
If you have people that have an emotional reaction to the car, they show up in the dealership just to look at it and go buy a Jetta while they're there. I mean, you didn't read the script. And I wish you hadn't just come to this conclusion because that's part of the script. The Beetle is what saved-
Volkswagen of America in the US. The new Beetle. The new Beetle. Yeah. Because no one was looking at the Mark III cars. They couldn't get anyone into the fucking dealerships. Their sales dropped to one-tenth. of what they had had been i mean volkswagen was seriously on the brink there were a bunch of analysts i've read a bunch of reports that they the reports of this report but vw had commissioned a report with a bunch of analysts and their the question was is it possible
to save VW away? Not should we, is it even possible? Should we even bother trying? And the answer was almost always no, like no matter who they asked. And then within seven years, VW sales were up seven X. And it was all the Beetle. You know, the dealers attributed the success of the Mark IV cars. The Mark IV cars came out right about the same time. They were spectacular. Mark IV and B5, I should say. B5 Passat. Yes, B5 Passat. Like that was like a really-
Spectacular. That was a PX Audi that was put with a Volkswagen badge on it. And the Mark IVs, everyone laughed. That was the car that PX said was going to be better than a Mercedes. And they were. Yeah. Admittedly Mercedes was at its Nadir at that point. True. But he was not wrong. He might have known that Mercedes is going to go to shit. Yes, through their annual collusion meeting or whatever. Yes, exactly. Annual collusion meeting.
Did we do a full, we didn't do a full episode discussion on that. We will do a collusion episode. But yeah, the dealers credited the Beatle with getting enough traffic in and while people were there were like, well, that's pretty. And that's gorgeous. And that's great. And they would just buy a facade. So it depends on what the intrinsic merits are of the rest of the Volkswagen line right now.
Meaning whether... In order to close that deal, right? They come in to look at the Beetle, but they end up going away with a Mark IV or a B5 because they're really good, like compelling products. When you bring them in now and they're there to look at an ID buzz, is there something else in...
in the showroom that's compelling enough to get them to say, I need that and I'm going to leave with it because it's actually quite good. Well, there certainly will be when Rivian's electronics underpin the NMEB cars. I don't know how long that's going to take. I think ID4 is a... I hold that car to a high standard because that was, so ID4 is ID3, right? ID3 is supposed to be the 928, right? It's the car that replaces the old.
mark seven golf effectively golf goes away and it goes that was their misguided idiotic intention with id3 um and so i'm gonna hold it to the standard that mark seven golf set And that as former and current owners of Mark 7 is a really high bar. Had anyone else come out with ID4, I might've been slightly less harsh on.
the styling and the space utilization and some of the other stuff. I think the styling is perfectly fine for the mainstream consumer. It's a little bit blobby. I don't think it has an identity. One of the lines in the episode is, this car has been on sale for four years. Did you know that? I mean, I think of all new cars as being newfangled. I don't think the general mass market consumer that knows exactly what a Jetta is.
even understands what an ID4 is, much less could recognize one, draw one, want one, any of those things. I think the car is so incredibly innocuous looking. Now had Buzz come out first and then ID4. everyone would look at ID4 and be like, that almost looks like that buzz thing. But they fucked up and four came out first.
this is like the bronco sport coming out before the bronco right although i don't think it did all that much damage but in the case of the id4 i think if buzz buzz had debuted that styling language people would would then sort of dream up when they saw an id4 and say oh it looks like that buzz but Let me go check this out. I think the ID.4 is a reasonably compelling product, but I do not recommend it over Model Y. Sure. Yes. That's the actual rub.
that's the problem and part of that is just tesla's charging network part of it is infotainment part of its price range i mean it's just sort of the id4 is a better built car in terms of you know assembly and traditional metrics, but I think I'd rather be in a...
I would not put up with the infotainment system on an ID4. I just wouldn't. I don't care. The rest of the car isn't sufficiently better. It feels regressive inside in terms of the screen real estate and how it's used and the slickness of the interface compared to a Tesla. Yeah.
I did when I get, when ID4, I got an early preview of ID4 that was static and I got to play around the car and it was an early, it was like a edition one or launch edition, what it was called. And it had a white interior and I was gushing over it. I'm like, well, this is great. It's fun. It's funky. It's different. It's got a lot of space. inside and then the first time i used it i was humiliated i was like i can't believe that
something that's physical hardware looks this good. I noticed the window switches, but I didn't think they were gonna be that obtuse. Oh. It was 105 degrees when we were filming. And I did turn on the heated steering wheel and the buzz approximately 2.7 trillion times. Again, same stupid thing. It's on the-
three o'clock position on the steering wheel. And every time you turn left, my thumb pad hits the steering wheel and turns it on. And then it's three presses plus a look far away on the screen to turn it off. It's fucking idiotic. So those are the kind of flaws in that car. Well, as long as the interior trims white. I don't think anyone's going to care about it. I mean, I love that you also...
found that interior as charming as I do. But at the end of the day, the exterior look, I mean, they did the same thing they did with New Beetle. They stuck to this. this design inside and out and made the whole car cheerful. Yes. And distinctive without, but accessible. And I think that's really important. People want something distinctive, but it also has to be something that they can buy. You know, you can be distinctive if you spend
a million dollars on whatever hyper car or you know buy a rolls-royce phantom but to have a chance at genuine expression for a mainstream car is not that common you know it's the charm of when the r53 mini came out for example even bronco yep i mean bronco is another one that just you know everyone stopped and stared at
because it's so great looking and so different looking and has such an identity. Hats off to Volkswagen for sticking with this. It took them 24 years. Yeah, I was just going to say the other thing, the reason why this is so compelling is because they threatened to... do this with the bus like ages ago when the new beetle came out yeah and they said well the new beetle thing went so well we should do it with the bus and everyone got really excited and then there's this whole subculture about
that existed about Beatles too, and then they didn't deliver on it. So there's this sort of like pent up tease that happened that's finally getting delivered on. It was 2001. That was 24 and a half or more years ago. that they've been torturing us with this. So I'm glad it's finally here. I can't wait to start seeing them on the roads. It was weird to be in England and see them circulating as publicly consumed cars because I had just been like...
you know, on the shoot, you're like, under embargo, you cannot post any pictures or anything of this car. And then I get to England, they're just in parking lots at grocery stores. That's so funny. And notice, like, they stood out in traffic. I've not seen one in, okay.
I mean, I was very maybe attuned to it because I had just been in this environment of interacting with one. We're going to see. I mean, people certainly lost their shit while I was driving around LA. I mean, I have pictures everywhere. But yeah, we'll see. I think it's a... I hope this Icons does well because it's a bit of a different story, right? It's very much the history of Volkswagen rather than a review. And it comes out the same day that everyone else's review comes out. I think that...
I mean, your approach is always different. Even if you're doing the same technique as other people, like the way that you sort of deliver and analyze things is distinctive. And so people will always consume what you have to say about the car, however it's delivered, whether it's a conventional review or... I think your fingers crossed. And we'll see. We'll see. I mean, it doesn't, at the end of the day, you know, view count is one, but one metric. I'm proud of the video. It's.
fun it's just very and it tells a unique story which you know is important because and you haven't even seen it you weren't there when we were smoking weed on the beach no i missed that part but i did see the bong You did the three-foot bong that Hackerty had to pay for on the prop budget. My boss is hysterical about this. He's like, you can't do this. And I'm like...
there's a line in the episode, it's legal. And he's like, but it's not legal on a federal level. And so just yesterday he was like, he... watched a scene that was on our server so that was not meant for him to see yet and he was like
Oh my God. And I'm like, we're going to cut out anytime where my mouth is on the bong, like it, you know, simulated whatever bubble. He's like, can you put smoke all over the one scene? And I'm like, yeah, there's a bong rip sound effect going on in like during the Hagerty, the house ad, like this message is brought to you.
and I pretend I'm stoned and I'm coughing through it. And then I like, you know, more info with the link below, what's a link? Like, you know, like it's stoner talk. Look again, in exactly the same way that Volkswagen committed holy to this thing everyone who bought buses was fucking stoned it was just the way it was but i'm and i put a bunch of warnings at the bottom because you know i have a huge violent distaste for anyone who does drugs or drinks while they're driving.
Aside from the fact that this video is being published on the website of an insurance company, but that has nothing to do with it. I would have put those warnings in there because we never imply that I'm stoned while driving. Like I get out of the car and I'm at the beach and it's parked and it's like, now I get to get high, right? Not that I actually did or I really ever do.
But while my boss is like hysterical about this, I get a news alert that Gavin Newsom signs into law. He signs this bill that allows marijuana cafes. So now starting- Two weeks ago, by the time this episode airs, in California, you will be able to walk into a cafe, order a joint or gummies and a pizza and like- potato chips or whatever stoner food you want. That's going to be very economically impactful.
bet it will but i just love that like he's like it's not federally legal and like we're in california and by the way in this you know two weeks after we recorded this you can go in and buy pot brownies and regular brownies and smoke a joint while having like popcorn covered with like caramel and chocolate sauce or schnoz berries or whatever the fuck you want. Like it's-
I know it's not legal on a federal level, and I really hope no one from Hagerty gets offended when they see the video, because no one has. But on the other hand, what is the culture around the bus? It's stoner culture. Right? That's the way it is. So we had a little bit of fun with this one. You always do. Mostly. The next one won't be as fun. Okay. We're not having any fun. No fun allowed. No fun on this show either.
okay well then i guess the best way to do that is to end it that's goodbye all right ciao