A noted automobile writer recently observed that the original Volkswagen Beetle was not a particularly pleasant vehicle to drive. It was slow as hell, it didn’t handle well, it wasn’t terribly safe, the heater didn’t work hardly at all, and so on.

To add insult to injury, he noted, the damn thing was built like a brick so it ran on and on and on forever. You simply could not beat it into the ground and have a merciful excuse to get rid of it.

No, what made the Volkswagen the coolest intellectual icon on the planet was the advertising. vw ads were so wry and funny and clever and yet down to earth that you went out and bought the car as a sort of four-wheel badge to make you as hip and non-conformist and anti-Detroit-fins-and-chrome-plate as the people who wrote ’em.

Certainly the ads were beautifully and simply written, but beyond style, they gave you little nuggets of information about the car. Headlines like Save water. Buy a Volkswagen, the car that doesn’t use any and After we paint the car we paint the paint and Lemon (the ad that boasted about vw’s production-line quality-control inspectors) and How the man who drives the snowplow gets to the snowplow (the vw engine was in the back, putting its weight onto the driving wheels, you dummy!) gave now and future Volkswagen

owners an arsenal of snappy, funny cocktail-party verbal ammo to defend their choice of a slow, small, funny-looking, non-American car.

And as Ries and Trout pointed out in their famous Positioning treatise, Chevrolet, the most heavily advertised brand on Earth has been spending hundreds of millions a year on Chevrolet advertising blasted directly at you since the day you were born and still you know nothing about Chevrolet except that there’s something called a Chevrolet Corvette that’s nothing at all like a Chevrolet.

So when we Ad Biz Elders heard they were recreating the Beetle, we thought it was merely an excuse to recreate great VW Advertising.

Well, so far I dunno. There’s the classic VW Beetle profile shot, unadorned with Supermodels or Golden Retrievers or English Country Inn courtyard settings. Just the shadow, please! There’s the Helvetica type, tastefully screened back into a soft grey murmur. We’re now so cool and all-knowing there’s no need for copy, is there? We already know everything worth knowing about Volkswagens, including the little white V on top of the larger white W in the blue circles means Volkswagen so there’s no earthly need to put the word Volkswagen in the ad, ja?

And of course, there’s the unmistakable look of the vehicle itself. It’s… it’s… a Bug for the Millennium! A 1960 Beetle that’s been left in a microwave oven about 15 seconds too long. What the hell else could it be?

And the headlines! If those original Doyle Dane Bernbach heads spoke in the ironic tones of an east-coast urban hipster, these should only dance from the lips of the Dalai Lama, you’ll pardon me for saying so.

0 to 60? Yes. says one. Another asks Is it possible to go forwards and backwards at the same time? (Oddly, you want to shout Yeah, the Studebaker! Remember the Studebaker?) A third assures us If you were really good in a past life, you come back as something better.

Well, the damn thing died, it’s been resurrected, and now it’s a religion. I get it. Maybe they know our memories of Beetles past are better and wiser and richer than anything they could think of to tell us about the new one, so they decided to just prop open the door of the church and wait inside. Drivers wanted, they say. Repent! This is advertising that Preaches to the Converted, man. Slip on your Hush Puppies, put your teeth in and let’s drive one into a river.

How else do you get old people to buy cars? Let us count the ways in the April issue of Saturday Night alone! GMC’s Jimmy is so refined, we’ll be tempted to call it James. Chrysler’s two models of something called a Sebring are The most compelling reason yet for wanting to be in two places at the same time. Lexus wants us to know Fresh, Hot, Black Asphalt Is Out There Somewhere. Drive Until You Find It. Volvo compares its four-wheel drive to The World’s Most Powerful Adhesive. A Chrysler van is What a penthouse looks like on the ground floor. Sedan it is. Sedate it’s not blathers Jaguar.

Unlike vw, they wrote copy, too. They shouldn’t have bothered. We already know how it goes.

Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He creates this column for fun, and to test the unproven theory that clients who find the latter amusing may also find the former to their liking. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533, or faxed at (416) 960-5255, at the Toronto office of Barry Base & Partners.