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Pokemon New Beetle
I had a rather amusing surprise this morning when one of the cutest New Beetles I've ever seen turned up at the IGN Towers parking lot and requested to be the star of today's Machine feature.
How could I not oblige? I mean look at it -- it's a four-wheeled Pikachu. How can you not laugh when you see something like this trundling past on the freeway? And anyway, it makes a change from the loony, high-performance supercars I usually talk about. So let's check it out…
Nintendo created this moving advertisement in conjunction with Pro-Body Works from Union, Montana and Xtreme Graphix over in St Louis, Missouri, and this car is one of ten that have been made to promote the Pokemon franchise.
The customization is mostly external. The car features two fiberglass roof-mounted horns, a bolted-on fiberglass tail and a very bright yellow paint job that has some excellent detailing. Viewed from the front, the Poke-Beetle has a perfect Pikachu face, with the headlights forming its eyes, a mouth above the radiator grille and subtle details like the little red cheeks surrounding the signal lights. The rear passenger windows and rear hatch window are fully painted with a host of different pocket monsters, and even the car's horn has been modified so that instead of beeping, it makes a very amusing and highly appropriate "Pika-Pika" noise. Cute.
The car's passenger cabin is completely stock, but the trunk is heavily modified and carries an embedded audio-visual system connected to an N64. This is ideal for promotional work, enabling the driver to park the car, open up the rear hatch and wait for hordes of Pokefans to gather around and start playing. Which doesn't take very long -- this car is to Pokemon fans what the Pied Piper of Hamlet was to rats.
Underneath all the fancy paintwork and extra goodies, the car is a standard New Beetle 1.9 liter turbo diesel that produces a very modest 90 horsepower. It's not exactly a tire-scorcher, but when you consider that the Pokemon fleet spends an awful lot of time on the road, the excellent reliability and 49 highway miles per gallon the engine gives means it's a very good choice for this kind of work.
The Poke-Beetle fleet is currently on the road right now, and if you want to take a look at the car pictured here, get your butt down to the San Rafael Mall at 5800 Northgate Drive in San Rafael this Saturday and Sunday.
If you like the look of this car, click here to download a massive, high-quality desktop picture of the picture shown above.
Or, if you want, you can click here to download a huge, high-quality desktop picture of the above side shot of the Poke-Beetle.
