In facelifts, car manufacturers usually focus on the headlights, grille and bumpers. Sometimes a car gets a completely new nose or butt, but rarely is the news mainly on the side. The Volkswagen New Beetle is the exception to that rule.
Facelifts, we’ve seen them in all shapes and sizes on this site. No wonder, because in addition to the car news, we have been lifting a weekly facelift on the Facelift Friday stage since August 2015. The Volkswagen New Beetle, the first retro Beetle from Wolfsburg, is also different from all other cars in this respect.
The facelift of 2005 does not seem to be much at first. The headlights, a common way to freshen up a car, even stayed with the old. Underneath we did find somewhat tighter turn signals and a newly arranged air intake at the bottom of the bumper, but those are subtle differences.
Still, more changed about the New Beetle carriage than you might think. The modified front bumper connects to completely new fenders. These examples, which have been ‘previewed’ on the fierce Beetle RSi for a while, have a much larger flat surface than the convex copies of the original New Beetle. The individual copies give it that characteristic, beetle-like shape that Volkswagen had in mind with this retro model in the 1990s, but also enabled the brand to refresh the side view of the car.
This modification was of course also implemented on the rear fender. It also included a newly arranged, clear light unit. The rear bumper was also tightened, with the number plate moving down a few decimetres.
The attentive viewer may have already spotted the new exterior mirrors. However, the rounded ones with integrated turn signals were introduced earlier, around the introduction of the convertible version in 2002.