Bitten By the New Beetle I got my first new car -- a 1998 VW Beetle. I'm ecstatic. I finally have a "cool" car. My Beetle came into my life two weeks ago when the '91 Ford Tempo that I inherited from my mom was on its last legs. In the eight years I've been driving, I've owned an '84 Chevy Chevette, an '85 Ford Thunderbird, an '87 Dodge Colt, and the aforementioned '91 Ford Tempo. My cars always got me around town (and sometimes across the country) without too many problems, but they were never anything special to look at or to drive. In high school, at an age when "cool" cars were extremely important status symbols, I drove my tan-colored '84 Chevette while my best friend drove a black 1979 convertible VW Beetle that she had received from her parents as a Sweet Sixteen birthday gift. There was really no competition over who had the coolest car. Everybody (myself included) loved her cute little car, although its heater never worked and it broke down constantly. My little Chevette was dependable but nothing much to look at. My friends would goof on it and sing "Bitchin' Chevette" to the tune of The Dead Milkmen's song "Bitchin' Camaro." I vowed that my next car would be some cool convertible or Jeep. The next car I "inherited" was my grandmother's '85 Ford T-Bird. It was definitely an older person's car, but I was happy just to have a car of my own, so I just covered it with Nine Inch Nails stickers and drove it like a maniac.

Some of my favorite features on the New Beetle: 1. The Bud Vase. I love having fresh flowers in my car. And it gives me more incentive to stop and pick daffodils at the side of the road. 2. Four airbags. Not only does this car have airbags for the front seat driver and passenger, but it has side impact airbags too. Plus, the side impact bags are built into the sides of the seats, rather than into the door itself. This means that the airbags are always perfectly positioned to protect you no matter how far forward or backward you have your seat set. They're also supposed to be safer since they implode outward, rather than inward. 3. The LOOK of the engine. I can't explain it. You'll just have to open up a hood and look at one for yourself. It's truly bizarre. My friends and I who are addicted to Babylon 5 think it looks like it was developed with Vorlon technology, but I guess you'd have to watch that show to understand. 4. The dashboard lights. The lights on the dashboard's instruments and gauges glow in purple-ish blue and red. And they're color coded -- the purple-ish blue ones are passive monitors of speed, fuel, etc. and the red lights are used for active controls, like the heater, stereo, hazard lights, etc. It really is "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights..." 5. Three-way front seat adjustments. Along with the usual backward/forward adjustment and the upright/layed-back adjustment, there's a cool pump handle to make your seat higher or lower. I'm only 5'2" tall, so I pumped mine up to the highest setting and now I don't even see the hood of the car while I'm driving. 6. The jaunty rear antenna. The short stubby antenna is positioned at an angle in the middle of the back hatch of the car, kind of like a cell phone antenna. It's cute. My only "complaints" with the car are two minor ones: 1. There isn't very much interior lighting. The main interior light is a tiny one on the rearview mirror. It just doesn't illuminate the car enough if you're looking for a Sex Pistols tape on the floor in the backseat. 2. The dashboard is annoying to clean. I think this is because the engine (which is located in front) is mostly underneath the dashboard, in order to accommodate the car's small snub nose. The dash looks cool, but it does need to be dusted (especially in pollen season) every week. Also, it makes it awkward to reach your arm to wash the entire (huge) windshield.

The New Beetle is the first car I've actually chosen for myself. And I absolutely love it! At approximately $17,000 (with the power windows, cruise control, air conditioning, fog lights, alloy wheels, etc), it's an extremely safe and well-built vehicle with incredible attention to detail and comfort (especially for its price range). I strongly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new car. My lust for the New Beetle started over a year ago. The wait was difficult to handle, and actually getting one of the cars wasn't easy either. Some dealers were charging a $2000 premium ABOVE sticker price, because the demand for the New Beetles exceeds the supply right now. (I somehow managed to find a dealer who wasn't charging a premium.) Over a year ago, in the winter of 1996 I heard the rumours that the folks at Volkswagen were going to be releasing a newly designed version of their Beetle in the spring of 1998. When I saw a photo of the futuristic and huggable car that was being called Concept One a few months later in early '97, I began obsessively checking the VW website to see if there was any confirmation that this unbelievable vehicle would be produced. So many car companies make futuristic prototypes for auto shows and then never produce them, and it looked like Volkswagen would be the company to push car designs into the future by actually making a car with a futuristic look. Finally, in the spring of 1997, some text appeared on their website about the New Beetle. There wasn't very much info, though. No revealing photos, no pricing, or standard equipment list, and no set date when the cars would be sold. I was jonesin' hard for info on this and immediately signed-up to be on Volkswagen's New Beetle info list, and submitted my mailing address so that I could get some promotional materials as soon as they were available. My brochures didn't arrive until October 1997 and they were mostly just teasers, without any solid info. I wondered whether the whole thing was a practical joke Volkswagen was playing on the world. But in January of this year, when my Ford Tempo began stalling while I was driving on the highway, I became even more dedicated in my quest for a new car and hoped it could be a Beetle. I called the local Volkswagen dealers and hounded them about the New Beetle. They said it would be coming in during the first week of March. The dealers were taking names and phone numbers of people who were interested in the Beetle and I made sure they all got mine. The first three weeks of March rolled by without any sign of the New Beetle. I hadn't seen a single car around town, or on any of the dealer's lots. I called the dealers constantly and forced myself to look at other makes and models of cars, as I was worried that my Tempo would die at any moment. Not one of the other cars I looked at made any serious impression on me aesthetically. Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys are nice but they look like every other car out on the road -- rather utilitarian and dull, definitely uninspiring. I did like the new Ford Taurus' interesting bubbly rounded design, but as a four-door sedan, it just seemed too large for me. I was also attracted to the VW Golfs and Passats, but I held out as long as I could in the hope that the Beetles would actually come in. On the 25th of March, I received a phone call from one of the VW dealers. He promised me that the cars were coming in that weekend. I rushed to talk to my bank about an auto loan. A little over a week later, on April 1, I signed the papers on my new car -- a "techno blue" bug. (I kept getting nervous that someone was going to shout "April Fools!" the whole time.) I've already put about 1,000 miles on my Beetle -- (in two weeks!) I've been going out of my way to drive anywhere, and even enjoy my two-hour round-trip commute to work. This car drives and handles extremely smoothly. You can easily go over 80 miles per hour and feel like you're going a mere 40. Plus, the automatic transmission that I got in mine adapts to your driving style -- if you're an aggressive driver or a more casual economic driver, it will learn and adapt. Plus, you can put fresh flowers in the bud vase on the dash, and always have flower power. I've already received thirty-four admiring "thumbs ups" (I've been keeping count!) from other drivers on the road, and numerous people have stopped me to ask how I like the car. The Beetle's futuristic AND retro design attracts attention. I'm thinking about video taping people's reactions to the car and making my own Beetle video. Maybe the New Beetle really IS "reverse-engineered from UFO technology," as the slick VW TV commercials proclaim. I'm definitely a believer.

JESSICA BARRON, jessb@poprocks.com is Purr's Managing Editor. She lives Providence, RI, and also works as the Managing Editor for CollegeBeat. Jess collects plastic Pez dispensers, watches Sci Fi shows, and drinks lots of red wine. Her homepage, Dangerous Candy, has all the sugar and twice the caffeine.