I had a 72 super beetle for years and have often thought the same thing.

 

I'm an old VW guy too.... have owned things, bugs, super beetles, a sand rail and a ghia. In college I drove a $175 yellow/white bus... it looked like a loaf of bread. Later in life I drove a honda element that my kids said looked like a toaster. They dared me to go get some thick foam (ie mattress pad) and airbrush the foam to look like toast and glue onto the roof.

I really enjoyed working on cars way back when. Syncing my dual carb setup, setting the valve clearance, changing engines in 30 minutes. Then I realized one day that every Vee dub I saw on the road had a bike rack on it. My g/f at the time pointed out to me that was better than a spare tire, that was spare vehicle.

So what I enjoy about my fit is getting in it and just driving it. If they'd still made the Element, I would have bought another w/o hesitation.

My 13 year old daughter says (with that sneer teens have) that my car "isn't even a prius". snicker. Yeah, b/c her car (ie no car) is soooo much nicer than mine. lol. She got my 19 year old niece cranked up picking on me about the fit.... then they drove it to Carowinds and the niece remarked how nice it drove relative to her chevy truck and that it only took $18 to fill up. Maybe she's seen the light.

 

I had a '69 Beetle and a '71 Super Beetle, now I'm shopping for a Fit.

 

Part of the VW 'vibe' was the fact that you *could* work on it yourself or mod it to be what you wanted it to be. The car was a symbol, in a sense – peak sales (over 800K units/year) were from 1961-1973, and culture was changing pretty dramatically in those years – the car somewhat mirrored that, and like the Prius today, became a bit of a social statement for some (not all) folks.

Having driven my '64 for six years in Atlanta GA traffic as a DD (and my '71 Type II for about five years before that), I got really familiar with oil changes every 2K (oh, do the valves while you're under there) and carrying enough tools to handle broken clutch cables, brake failures and all the other maladies that affect 50+ year-old vehicles.

And I liked it!

The Fit is efficient and a bit quirky which hits some of the points that made the Beetle such a part of culture, but it's really never going to be the same as the Beetle, at least not on the broader cultural scale.

I love mine, but I especially love that it should go 200K miles with minimal attention…

Now excuse me – I need to go work on my two Beetle projects! (c:

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