By otakuyassine3@gmail.com 
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around, but my kid is now somehow 14 years old. How did this happen? The passage of – what, time? Is that how this works? Is that why he’s taller than me now? My phone keeps showing me pictures of him from years that I have to remind myself aren’t the present, like 2021 or 2018 or whatever, all of which just feel like yesterday and there he is in those pictures, all kid-like and tiny, next to me, a me wearing the same damn clothes I just threw in the hamper yesterday, and then I see that lanky tube of a teenager clomping around my house and realize holy crap, that’s my kid. A kid who will be driving in two years.
As you can imagine, the First Car decision is a big one for me, being such a hopeless gearhead as I am. One’s first car is, I think, a Big Deal in life, and of course I have all sorts of ideas about what makes a good first car. My own first car was a $600 1968 VW Beetle, the color of Wrigley’s gum or maybe a long-unwashed prosthetic leg. I loved that thing. My parents were not particularly interested in buying me a car, and we had none to hand down, so I worked my ass off at my job at the Byte Shop to save up the money, getting the job when I was 15 (which required special paperwork) so I’d be ready to buy the car the nanosecond I turned 16.
I’m happy to buy my kid his first car, and I want it to be one he actually wants. My kid, Otto, used to be very into cars, and I tried to expose him to all sorts of good weird car goodness. Like this:
I think because of the weird shit I exposed him to, Otto ended up with some happily perverse car tastes. For example, for a while, his favorite car was a Denzel. One of these:
Of course, the odds of me buying him a Denzel are about on par with me buying him a winged sasquatch to travel around on, so that’s a non-starter. And now he’s much less into cars than he was as a younger kid, perhaps because of how hard he and I were into cars for so long. But I know he still likes cars, and has his own car preferences,
When it comes to finding out what he wants for a first car, it’s been interesting. For a while he wanted a PT Cruiser, which I think would be a decent choice for a charmingly weird kid in 2026 to drive, but just the other day, he expressed a new first-car choice: a Volkswagen New Beetle. In green.
I was happy to hear this, because I’ve always liked the New Beetles, even if I know they’re a sort of costume on a Golf and plagued with all the late ’90s/early 2000s VW issues, of which there are, sadly, many. But I still like them. And part of me likes the idea that both dad and kid will have a kind of Beetle as a first car.
Otto’s reasons for wanting one, though, had nothing to do with any of that, and are actually a lot more interesting. He wants one because he says they are “Frutiger Aero.”
Now, I suspect that many of you are by now decanting more brandy into your snifters and thoughtfully sloshing it around as you wonder, aloud, “the fuck is Frutiger Aero?” And that’s a great question. Frutiger Aero is an aesthetic, one that started around 2001 or so and peaked in the mid to late 2000s. It’s the colorful, glossy sort of look that interfaces like the “Aqua” look Mac OS X started with, and the Windows Aero visual theme.
It’s all of those iMac-inspired semi-transparent candy-colored plastic computers and microwaves and bubbles and glossy lozenges and waves of crystal-blue water and tropical fish and all of that glossy crap you remember from the early part of the century. I remember when this look first hit the scene, and I remember being delighted. It was so optimistic and high-tech but also strangely “natural” in a sort of idealized, artificial way. It was a high-tech future that, for a change, wasn’t all gleaming steel and silver and smooth lines and massive metal monoliths. It was actually fun.
I think I even had one of those iMac-like microwaves, in glossy, transparent blue.
Oh, and if you’re curious, the name comes from Adrian Frutiger, who designed fonts that were commonly used with this look.
From the very beginning, the New Beetle was part of this aesthetic movement; in fact, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, talked about the New Beetle in a well-known article about the iMac. Here’s that Newsweek article about Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac, which starts with Steve Jobs seeing a New Beetle:
“Look at That!” says Steve Jobs he pulls his Mercedes into a parking space. He’s pointing at a new Volkswagen Beetle, and as soon as he parks, he dashes over, circling the shiny black Bug, taking the measure of a well-publicized update of once great product design. “They got it right,” he concludes.
Steve Jobs is about as good a spokesperson for Frutiger Aero as you can get, really. The New Beetle was absolutely as much a product of its time as the original was a product of 1930s advanced automotive design. And it’s even weirder that the new one is an update of that 1930s one, but if we keep going down that road our brains will start to hurt.
Anyway, look how close, aesthetically and conceptually, the advertising was for the New Beetle and the iMac:
So, if Otto is into Frutiger Aero, it absolutely makes sense he’d want a New Beetle. And why he’s into Frutiger Aero is interesting, because while to me, that period just feels kind of dated, to him it’s the exciting time just before he was actually born and into his youth. When I was growing up, this period would have been late ’60s and early ’70s design, and I was a sucker for that, too.
To this day, I think 1960s-era car design is my favorite, and I have a fondness for things like avocado-colored appliances and conversation pits and 1970s computers and all other sorts of bullshit that my parents likely couldn’t wait to be rid of. Otto is just doing the same thing, just with a different set of garish colors and absurd design cues.
I’m happy to indulge this. If he has an outdated favorite look, who am I to tell him no? Besides, New Beetles are pretty cheap, and they’re not the same kind of deathtraps that the Beetle I grew up with was; the IIHS gave these a “good” overall rating:
Now, the early 2000s VW reliability stuff is a bigger issue, but I think the basic 1.8-liter ones and even the 1.8 turbos weren’t too bad, and for all the other stuff that fails, well, that’s a chance for him to learn something about cars. Hell, I spent lots of my early driving years rolling under my Beetle with a screwdriver to bridge the solenoid terminals to get it started and all that kind of thing, and I’m pretty sure it either built whatever “character” is or at least got me used to things going wrong, which is a valuable life skill, right?
Whatever. It’s the Frutigerest, Aeroist of cars, and if that’s what he’s into, then, well, that’s a dream I think we could make happen. I have two years to find a good one!
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