2012–2019 Volkswagen Beetle Used Car Review From An Actual Owner
The best car I’ve owned but/because it’s not perfect
Update for 2023:
I’ve since sold this car and even though I had “good” reasons to sell it, I miss it a lot. Wish I had had the space to keep it as a second car.
Also while you’re here reading my nonsense, if you’re interested in tech and startups, I’m writing about my falling-off-a-cliff experiences of starting up some new stuff. Follow along at https://angus.plus/
And now onto the article…
I’ve had a 2013 Volkwagen Beetle for about five years now and that just about meets my threshold for feeling qualified to write a review on a product. There are plenty of proper car reviews out there, but not enough that’ll give you a real look into what ownership might be like.
So this is that.
(Note that I have the 2.5L coupe with a manual transmission, so I can’t speak to the 1.8T or the automatic or the convertible.)
Is it reliable?
Let’s start with the big thing for a used car: reliability. In almost five years, the number of things that have gone wrong is: 0. Including the past owner, that’s 8 years of faultless driving. Now that I’ve written that I’m sure it’ll blow up tomorrow, but up until today it’s been perfectly perfect. (Update: remained perfect until I sold it at 85,000kms.)
The odometer is still under 100,000 kms, so this isn’t totally surprising. But it’s still great. I once had a brand new Toyota Celica that fried its own computer if you looked at it funny, so you never know.
Also both myself and the previous owner took really good care of it, so YMMV if you get one that has been abused.
There has been one recall for the airbags which I just got this year. So if you get a Beetle, make sure you look up that recall.
An asterisks for winter and cold weather
So nothing broke, and it always started no matter how cold it was, but there is one major design flaw if you live somewhere with cold winters and park it outside: the windows.
It’s the rather major inconvienece of the doors freezing shut in the winter.
The doors have no window frames, so the windows have to go up/down a little bit when you open/close the doors so they can tuck under the door seal. It’s a neat feature that happens seemlessly in the summer. But if the window can’t move, then the door can’t open. So if the window gets covered in ice and freezes to the door along the lower seam, it won’t move when you try to open the door … so you can’t get into your car.
And, as you may or may not know, getting in your car is often a mandatory precursor to driving it.
This problem is apparently common with cars that have frameless windows, but this is my third such car and I’ve never had this problem before. Regardless, there are some tricks to deal with it — I keep a few old plastic cards (the ones that are the same shape as a credit card but less important) in my wallet to ‘slice’ the frozen window away from the door. But this sucks balls on a really cold day when you’re already late. My advice would be don’t get this car if you plan to park it outside during harsh winters. Or plan ahead and give yourself time to de-ice it like a plane.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about all the good, surprising, and notable stuff.
The Basics
Cargo space
First is that it’ll hold more crap than you might expect. I did not get it to be an object transporter but that turned out to be mostly what I use it for. I will often put the back seats down and use it like a small van.
It’s a tight squeeze, but it can hold two bikes and enough luggage for a week away if your packing-tetris is on point. I used it to move and the only thing I owned that I couldn’t transport in it was my mattress. I don’t own much stuff, and it took a few trips, but still. That’s pretty good.
Power and handling
Okay, how about power? Well, I’m guessing if you’re looking at a Beetle, then high performance is not really a main concern. It’s not fast. But it won’t ever give you that “underpowered small car” feeling when you’re, saying, over-taking on the highway and have the back loaded to the roof with all sorts of who-knows-what.
The low-down torque makes it a really snappy city drive also.
As for the handling, I’m not an expert on these things but the handling always did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was always fun to drive and gave me plenty of confidence to do dicey evasive maneuvers and emergency highway stops like, say, the time a moose ran in front of us.
Comfort
How about comfort? It’s pretty comfortable. The ride is much nicer than a MINI, but it’s not as comfy as a Volvo S60 for example. And it’s pretty much exactly like a Golf. It doesn’t feel like a luxury car, but it’s not a budget car either.
The seats are amazing. I love that it came in the highest spec without leather seats (something I’ve never seen as an ‘upgrade’) and they fit my small frame nicely without being too bolstered.
The center armrest is in a great location as well, but is tricky to ‘lock’ into place sometimes. I still don’t quite know how it works but when it does the height is perfectly lined up with the gear lever.
I found driving it perhaps a bit harsher / noisier than I would want, given the relaxing nature of this car’s vibe, but only by a small margin. It wasn’t a huge difference, but I did prefer when the 16" steel wheels with winter tires were on to when the 17" alloys with summer tires were.
On the highway, it was sure-footed and really stable at speed for a car this size, so it’s a solid medium-distance cruiser. And again, way better than it’s main rival, the back-breaking-but-more-fun-to-drive MINI.
Visibility and Parking
It’s pretty small, so easy enough to park anywhere and get in and out of tight spots. The visibility forward is good. But it’s really hard to tell how far back it goes. (The rear window and the bumper level are not the same like in hatchbacks.)
There’s no backup camera in the older model years including mine, and the rearwear visibility is limited so it reminds me of parking a sports car. I’m used to that from my foolish younger days, but if you’re not then I’d recommend getting an aftermarket reverse camera installed. Then it’ll be easy gravy.
Wonderful Interior Oddities
The gas gauge is huge. But the rearview mirror is so tiny it’s barely even there.
(Again, this car sacrifices some practicality for design.)
It has two glove boxes, and a third small compartment on the driver’s side that I didn’t know about until a homeless person rummaged through my accidentally-left-unlocked car for spare change one night.
The interior is that nice VW balance of being good quality without trying to make you feel fancier than you are. I think the white gloss plastic dash is genius. Piano black is so popular these days but the white brightens up the cabin, and doesn’t show glare or fingerprints or scratches. It’s a fantastic way to do a plastic interior without it looking cheap.
The infotainment looks super dated in the 2013 model at least (later ones get newer systems) but it’s easy to use and uses mostly physical buttons if you’re into that. Which I am.
The Fender sound system is great, especially when the trunk is empty and the subwoofer can woof. It doesn’t have the detail as some super high end systems of course, but I still recommend finding a car with that option fitted if you like music. The SD card slot, AUX port and bluetooth make it easy to hook up whatever device. I just stuck to the SD card most of the time though.
Lastly, I’ll share my favorite bit: the steering wheel. With the industry going towards thick and chunky wheels, I love how skinny the Beetle’s steering wheel is. If you have small hands, it just feels better. It’s supposedly a retro thing, but for me it was a good-fit thing. It’s more wrapping your hand around a baseball bat than palming a basketball.
On an unrelated note, this car is also one of the worst basketball players I’ve ever met. If that matters to you.
Other annoying things?
I do not like the push-button start and accessory mode. If you forget to put up the window or something and you need to get back in and need a little power to put the window back up, you can turn the accessory power on with a quick press of the start button. Great. But you can’t turn it off without then turning the car on first, because the next quick press of the button turns the car on. So it essentially doesn’t have a useful accessory power mode. Weird. Maybe I’m missing something, but this was different from previous start/stop buttons I’ve used and made me miss old-style key ignitions.
Conclusion
So should you buy a Volkswagen Beetle? I dunno, make your own decisions.
I can tell you that it was a bit of a gamble when I got mine — I didn’t know if I’d like it or how people might judge me for it because I was young and still cared about such things — but there was something I liked about it that I couldn’t describe and so I went for it.
And I can tell you I loved it.
I’ve really, really enjoyed owning my Beetle. It’s a special car. There’s something oddly charming about stuffing a Beetle to the brim and going on a roadtrip with someone special that just wouldn’t be the same in a Rav4.
So when they announced that this generation of Beetle would be the last, I was disappointed. I’d happily buy another if there was a newer one to buy. But when I look at what they’ve done to the new (Mk. 8) Golf, with screens and touch-sensitive buttons for everything, I’m kind of glad the Beetle didn’t make it to see this next generation of cars. Not that there’s anything wrong with the market shifting to higher tech cars, but the Beetle is old-school. The Beetle is classic.
I wouldn’t want it to bend to car tech trends just to keep up.
But who knows, maybe they’ll ressurrect the brand again, and I’ll spend my golden years in a self-driving electric 2045 Volkswagen Beetle.
If you have any weird or specific questions about it, leave a comment. Happy to help out any perspective Beetle owners out there!
