Here’s ride that is sure to put smiles on petrol heads’ faces. Aptly named “Huge Bug”, it is a custom upsized 1959 Volkswagen Beetle convertible. Well, it is not actually from 1959, but it was based on a 1959 Beetle convertible.
Created by Californian Scott Tupper and his father, who both love the classic, but think it could use a little size bump. The original plan was to upsize it by 50%, but that wouldn’t be legal on California’s roads and so, it was scale back.
The result is what you see here. It looks like a VW Beetle from an alternate dimension where everything was larger. Very surreal. A 1959 VW Beetle convertible serves as the base for the design.
The classic ride was digitized by scanning the car and upsized digitally to create build templates for custom body panels. However, it is only a Beetle as far as eyes can see. What we can’t (see) aren’t quite VW at all. For example, it makes no sense to fabricate an upsized chassis which may sustain the new found heft.
That said, this upsized 59’ VW Beetle borrowed the chassis of a Dodge truck and the power plant is also from a Dodge automobile (a 5.7L HEMI V8 from a Magnum, we heard).
If you don’t pop the hood, everything looks like a regular VW Beetle, but larger. Very much larger. It is truck size, basically.
Also, it had an automatic transmission, which the duo cleverly disguised as a manual transmission with fake clutch pedal (which is actually also a brake pedal) to boot.
Speaking of disguise, it has modern equipment too, including power windows, power lock, and heated and ventilated seats. Admirably, efforts were made to try to disguise the evidence that it has those modern equipment so the car looks, you know, period-accurate.
Even the gauges are mounted in a retractable pod that only appears below the dashboard when activated.
We are impressed and while we have not see this in person, seeing it in video is surreal enough. Like, seriously, are we in Alice in Wonderland?
Images: YouTube (Barcroft Cars).
Source: Barcroft Cars via Carscoops.
