20th Birthday Of The New Beetle
Festival visitors celebrate the birthday of the lifestyle icon
The Beetle Sunshine Tour is the largest meeting of the Beetle, New Beetle and Käfer community in Europe. For the first time, the festival in 2018 will not take place in Lübeck, but in Wolfsburg and thereby in the heart of the Volkswagen world. For good reason, because the New Beetle presented in 1998 is celebrating its 20th birthday and because it was the impetus for the first Beetle Sunshine Tour in 2004. The Beetle Sunshine Tour has its origins in the Lübeck district of Travemünde, directly on the Baltic Sea. Gaby Kraft, the inventor and organiser of the Beetle Sunshine Tour, lives there in Schleswig-holstein. Fourteen years ago she initiated the first tour with 60 participating vehicles.
Although it remained informal, the Beetle Sunshine Tour has long
since taken on another dimension. In 2017, there were more than 700 registered Beetles, New Beetles and Käfer and around 4,000 participants. The organisers limited this enormous number of vehicles to 200 cars in 2018, as otherwise the convoy would have exceeded the organisational limits of the planned Volkswagen plant procession. In less than three hours after the online announcement of the Beetle Sunshine Tour 2018, all of the available starting places for this year's tour were allocated.
But as always with the Beetle Sunshine Tour, the same applies in 2018. All fans of the water-cooled or air-cooled cult-status vehicles and the Volkswagen brand are welcome to visit the festival grounds right next to Autostadt Wolfsburg. Participants and visitors mingle and make up the Beetle, New Beetle and Käfer community. With their attractive design and classless status, all three generations of this Volkswagen appeal to people who share a cosmopolitan and positive attitude to life.
The series production of the New Beetle was presented to the world by Volkswagen at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January 1998. And this was the beginning of Beetlemania – from a former means of transport during ‘the economic miracle’ to a timeless lifestyle icon.