Beetle and the Beast

By MARTIN MILLER

March 17, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s not the idea of the new Ford Excursion that bugs Michael Hasenfratz. It’s the physical reality of the 4-ton SUV someday squashing him like a bug--inside his new 1-ton Volkswagen Bug--that does.

“Already when the SUVs zoom past, my car kind of shakes,” says Hasenfratz, a 19-year-old student at Moorpark College. “And now they are making one bigger than the [Ford] Expedition? I better watch out.”

It’s not easy driving a compact car in a sport-utility vehicle world. And it’s not going to get any easier later this year when the SUV universe expands a little more. Actually, a lot more.

The Ford Excursion, which was unveiled this week in Dallas as the largest SUV in America, will be available for sale in Southern California this autumn. The 19-foot-long monster, which has already been dubbed “Ford-asaurus” by its critics, will cast a shadow capable of swallowing whole a couple of Volkswagen Beetles.

The contrast in size--and attitude--between the ultimate SUV and the ultimate compact car is not lost on Bug owners.

“The people who drive the huge SUVs usually think they own the road,” complains Hasenfratz, who relies on his blue 1999 Volkswagen New Beetle for his part-time job as a food delivery person. “Basically, they have a tank; it’s not like they are going to get hurt or anything.”

So if you can’t beat ‘em, why not join ‘em? After all, with a sticker price on a par with lower-end SUVs, many VW New Beetle owners could easily have put themselves behind the wheel of a much larger automobile.

Pshaw. Bugs make a statement, they say. And so do SUVs, though not one Bug owners care to make.

“I’ve driven a friend’s SUV, and I would never own one,” says Karen Raab, who runs an art gallery in Newport Beach. “They are way too trendy. They are too huge, and I have no use for one.

“But my Beetle is so cute,” adds Raab, 40, whose last car was a Saab. “It just fits me. I’m kind of silly. I like to have fun. The car is just kind of me.”

There are other advantages that Bug owners claim too. They name their cars. Raab calls her silver-colored Bug “Lily.” On her dashboard she keeps a straw with a toy frog atop it in a bud vase. “It’s like a lily pad.”

Another privilege of ownership seems to be an unspoken camaraderie between Bug drivers, Hasenfratz says. Bug drivers, he says, tend to be independent, free-thinking people and, as it turns out, friendly.

“I wave to other people that have Bugs,” Hasenfratz says. “It’s not like other cars. If you have an Excursion, I don’t think you’ll see people waving at each other. Bugs are a special car.”

You don’t have to be a Beetle owner to realize it has a certain mystique. When Dave Kapell, president of Magnetic Poetry Inc., was deciding what car to use to promote a national literacy campaign, he didn’t have to think too long.

His concept was to turn a trio of Bugs--covered with hundreds of magnetic word tiles--into roving pages of poetry written by America’s schoolchildren. The trio will make dozens of stops around the country beginning at the end of this month in hopes of getting children to catch the “poetry bug.”

(A “Poetry Bug” is scheduled to make an appearance at the Los Angeles Children’s Museum on April 1. For more information, visit the Web site at http//www.poetrybug.com.)

“It’s a play on words, of course,” says Kapell, 36, a former songwriter. “But it made more sense to go with the Bug. It’s the peace, love and understanding vehicle, and it has the ring of poetry to it.”

Kapell, despite owning an SUV in his home state of Minnesota, says he never considered using one of America’s most popular kinds of cars for his project. However, he did admit there would be advantages to a vehicle like the Excursion.

“I guess we could have fit an epic poem on it,” Kapell says. “It would give us a chance to use the words ‘enormous’ and ‘leviathan,’ which we have [on magnets].

“I guess the kids will just have to be content writing haiku [on the Bug] by comparison,” he said.

It’s this kind of smart-aleck talk that is driving some folks at Ford crazy. Great, so Bug people are all about peace, love and understanding--which means that Excursions are about greed, excess and waste? The Ford Excursion is the “Ugly American” on wheels, is that it?

“All of a sudden, [the Excursion] is like the big, bad wolf,” says Harold Allen, a spokesman for Ford Motor Co. “We are giving people what they want. We are making them safe. I don’t understand it. Everything about our car is bad, bad, bad.”

Ford officials, though, are offering another spin to their massive SUV. First, it’s more environmentally friendly than you might think. One-fifth of the SUV is made from recycled materials. And it will spew up to 43% less tailpipe emissions than permitted by law, Ford officials say.

Also, the Excursion features a unique safety device underneath the front bumper called the BlockerBeam that Volkswagen Bug owners may want to take note of. The BlockerBeam helps prevent a car from sliding underneath the SUV during a front collision.

“This reduces the amount of intrusion into the passenger compartment, further reducing the car occupants’ risk of injury,” said a news release, which didn’t elaborate on what happens to a car that collides with the Excursion.

But critics, who have also called the Excursion the Ford Valdez (“Have you driven a tanker lately?”), aren’t being entirely fair, according to auto historian James Ward. If we really want someone to blame, we should look in the mirror, says Ward, a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“This car is as American as apple pie,” he said. “It’s big, it’s fat, it’s crude, it’s us.

“If you’re Ford and you had to design an SUV, where can you go in this market?” he added. “They all look alike. So you build one big enough to put your grandma and her bed in, and then you can say you’re one up on the competition.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Machine Versus Machine

Volkswagen Beetle

Length: 161.1 inches

Height: 59.5 inches

Weight: 2,712 pounds

Fuel capacity: 14.5 gallons

Passengers: three

Trunk space: 12 cubic feet

Cost: About $18,600

Ford Excursion

Length: 227 inches