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Sometimes things just stick in the back of your brain like little morsels of meat after a good porkchop dinner. You could floss it out, but it’s also occasionally rewarding to work at that morsel for a while after the meal. Same goes for those random bits of maybe-true-maybe-fictitious nuggets of car lore you overheard once at a car show or in a buddy’s shop. You could bother researching it to get down to the truth of the matter, or you could ruminate on the idea for a while, facts be damned.
I have one I’ve held on to for a couple decades now. I couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15 when, at some random car show, I came across a narrowed tandem-seat Volkswagen Beetle, sort of like the apparently semi-famous California-based one in the photo above (though not the same one – the one I saw was blue, I think, and either in Ohio or Kentucky). The owner told me that Volkswagen itself built a limited run of narrowed Beetles called Thinbugs, and hell, I didn’t know any better, so I believed him.
Of course, I never saw another one after that, and the longer I went without seeing another one, the more I suspected the owner of that Thinbug was yanking my chain. But even once the Internet came along and I had the ability to research what that guy said, I never looked it up until today – in part because I’d held on to that little bit of apocrypha for so long that I wanted to believe in it regardless of whether it was true. Also, in part, because I didn’t want to accept that I’d been fool enough to believe the Thinbug story.
So let’s all go in for a big flossing today. Tell us about the auto-related stories you’ve bought into but which you suspect might not be true. Or only half-true. Or which you know are complete fabrications but you still hold on to for some reason. Somebody here’s sure to set you straight.
And would somebody clear up the Thinbug story for me once and for all?
Source: blog.hemmings.com
