My kid decided he wanted a new Beetle for his first car because it was so “Frutiger Aero.”

It’s hard for me to understand, but my child is somehow 14 years old now. How did that happen? The passage of – what, Time? Is that how it works? Is that why he’s taller than me now? My phone keeps showing me pictures of him from years ago that I have to remind myself are not the present, like 2021 or 2018 or whatever, which all feel like yesterday, and there he is in these pictures, all childlike and tiny, next to me, a me wearing the same damn clothes I just threw in the laundry basket yesterday, and then I see this lanky teenager stomping through my house and I realize that this is my child. A child who will be driving a car in two years.

As you can imagine, the first car decision is a big one for me as I’m such a hopeless gearhead. In my opinion, your first car is a big deal in life, and of course I have all sorts of ideas about what makes a good first car. My first car was a $600 1968 VW Beetle, the color of Wrigley’s gums or perhaps a long-unwashed prosthetic leg. I loved that thing. My parents weren’t particularly interested in buying me a car and we didn’t have one to leave behind, so I worked my ass off at the Byte Shop job to save the money and got the job when I was 15 (which required special requirements). paperwork) so that the nanosecond I turn 16 I would be ready to buy the car.

I’m excited to buy my child his first car and I want him to actually have one wants. My child Otto used to be a huge car fan and I tried to introduce him to all sorts of cool, strange cars. Like this:

I think Otto ended up developing a happily perverted taste in cars because of the weird shit I put him through. For example, his favorite car was a Denzel for a while. One of them:

Of course, the probability of me buying him a Denzel is about as high as the probability of me buying him a winged Sasquatch to travel around with, so that’s a non-starter. And now he’s much less interested in cars than he was as a younger kid, maybe because he and I were interested in cars for so long. But I know he still likes cars and has his own preferences about cars.

It was interesting to find out what he wanted for his first car. For a while he wanted a PT Cruiser, which I think would be a good choice for a charmingly weird kid in 2026, but just recently he voiced a new choice for his first car: a Volkswagen New Beetle. In green.

I was happy to hear that because I’ve always liked the New Beetles, even though I know they’re kind of a costume for a Golf and are plagued with all the VW problems of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, including: unfortunately many. But I still like her. And part of me likes the idea of ​​father and child’s first car being some kind of Beetle.

However, Otto’s reasons for wanting one had nothing to do with that and are actually much more interesting. He wants one because he says they are “Frutiger Aero”.

Now I suspect that many of you are now pouring more brandy into your glasses and swirling it thoughtfully while wondering aloud, “The hell is that Frutiger Aero?” And that’s a great question. Frutiger Aero is an aesthetic that began around 2001 and peaked in the mid to late 2000s. It is the colorful, glossy look of user interfaces, similar to the “aqua” look of Mac OS X and the visual design of Windows Aero.

It’s all those iMac-inspired, semi-transparent, candy-colored plastic computers and microwaves and bubbles and shiny diamonds and waves of crystal blue water and tropical fish and all that shiny crap you remember from the first half of the century. I remember when this look first came out and I remember being excited. It was so optimistic and high-tech, but also strangely “natural” in a kind of idealized, artificial way. It was a high-tech future that, for once, wasn’t all shiny steel and silver and smooth lines and massive metal monoliths. It was really fun.

I think I even had one of those iMac-like microwaves in shiny, transparent blue.

Oh, and if you’re curious, the name comes from Adrian Frutiger, who designed fonts that were commonly used with this look.

The New Beetle was part of this aesthetic movement from the beginning; In fact, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, talked about the New Beetle in a well-known article about the iMac. Here is the Newsweek article about Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac, the begins with Steve Jobs seeing a New Beetle:

“Look at this!” says Steve Jobs as he drives his Mercedes into a parking space. He points to a new VW Beetle, and as soon as he’s parked, he runs over and circles the shiny black Beetle, setting the standard for a widely advertised update of the once-great product design. “You did it right,” he concludes.

Steve Jobs is truly the best Frutiger Aero spokesperson you can get. The New Beetle was absolutely as much a product of its time as the original was a product of the progressive automotive design of the 1930s. And it’s even stranger that the new one is an update of the 1930s model, but if we continue down this path our brains will start to hurt.

Anyway, see how close the advertising for the New Beetle and the iMac was aesthetically and conceptually:

So if Otto likes Frutiger Aero, it makes perfect sense that he would want a New Beetle. And Why He’s into Frutiger Aero and that’s interesting because while that time seems kind of dated to me, for him it’s the exciting time right before his actual birth and in his youth. When I was growing up, that period was late ’60s and early ’70s design, and I was a fan of that too.

To this day, I consider 1960s car design to be my favorite design, and I have a fondness for things like avocado-colored appliances and talk boxes and 1970s computers and all other kinds of nonsense that my parents probably couldn’t wait to get rid of from. Otto does exactly the same thing, just with different bright colors and absurd design elements.

I’d like to treat myself to that. If he has a favorite outdated look, who am I to tell him no? Plus, New Beetles are pretty cheap and aren’t the same death traps as the Beetles I grew up with; The IIHS rated these overall as “good”:

Now the reliability of the early 2000s VW models is a bigger issue, but I think the basic 1.8L models and even the 1.8 turbos weren’t that bad, and for all the other things that fail, this is a chance for him to learn something about cars. Heck, I spent a lot of my early driving years rolling around under my Beetle with a screwdriver trying to jump the magnetic clamps so it would start and so on, and I’m pretty sure it either created the “character”. has, or at least I’ve gotten used to things going wrong, which is a valuable life skill, right?

Whatever. It’s the Frutigerest, the aeroist of cars, and if that’s what he’s into, then I think it’s a dream we could make happen. I have two years to find a good one!

The Volkswagen New Beetle was a huge deal when it came out and still deserves your respect today: Car Redemption

A new Beetle owned by Dennis Rodman and George Foreman is up for auction and has a piercing

Here’s the story behind the 1960s VW Beetle redesign and why it never happened