The Bug That's Loads Better

Be careful not to pick-up a Bug! German engineer Heiko Bohringer did, and it cost him more than £70,000.

Bohringer's remarkable Beetle was created after he worked on the New Beetle project for VW. It was one of many variants that were rejected at the design stage, but he decided to go ahead with the idea privately.

He enlisted the help of two friends - Gunter Dahkne, who restores original VW Beetles for a living, and Jens Duwel, a caravan designer. Between them, the three men took a standard Beetle and cut away the

rear, using the sketch Bohringer put before VW's design chiefs as a guide.

They left part of the roof intact to convert into a wind deflector, and kept the rear floorpan and inner wheelarches in place. The engineers then made their own load bay out of fibreglass, designing it to accommodate a quad bike.

In total, the project cost him nearly 110,000 Euros - around £73,000. "I wish Volkswagen would build it," he told us. "The company thinks it would not sell, but from the reaction it gets, I think VW may be wrong."

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