From the Back Seat of a Beetle to IDLE

I was five years old when my father bought his first Beetle: an orange Volkswagen 1200 Spar-Käfer.

Somewhere along the way he had caught the bug. In Dutch we call it het Kevervirus — the Beetle virus — which is a more honest name for it, because it is contagious. My father caught it first, and then, the way these things go, he passed it on to me.

That is where this story starts. Not in a showroom or a magazine, but in the back seat of an orange Beetle, too young to know that anything was being passed on at all.

After a number of events with the orange Beetle, the decision was made to restore it.

Anyone who has ever started a restoration will know how this part goes. The project ran on, year after year, and the car slowly disappeared further and further into the corner of the shed — until it was less a project than part of the building.

In the end it was sold, still waiting for the restoration it had been promised.

Its place was taken by a red Jeans Bug.

Around 2003 or 2004, my father joined KeverClub Nederland, regio Limburg. I joined too — not by choice, exactly, but automatically. Where he went, I went, and where he went was increasingly a field full of Volkswagens.

With the club we went to VW Euro, Beautiful Budel, InterClassics in Maastricht and the Keverwinterfestijn in Rosmalen. In 2004 we went to VW Euro with the whole regional team, for what would turn out to be the last time.

In 2005, Herbie: Fully Loaded had its premiere, and the club was asked to put a few Beetles on display at the Royal Theaters in Heerlen. A film about a Beetle, with real Beetles on display for it. For a kid who had grown up in the back of one, that was about as good as it got.

The same year, our red Jeans Bug was stolen.

There is not much more to say about that, and it does not need more. Anyone who has lost a car they loved knows the feeling.

My father had always been clear about one thing. Whatever else happened, he would never buy a green Beetle.

Some time later, a green Beetle appeared on our driveway.

I have since learned not to take it too seriously when someone in the aircooled world says they will never do something.

We took that green Beetle to more events than I can count. At first we slept in a tent that was far too small for us. Later, when my mother and my younger brother started coming along more often, we bought a folding trailer tent, and the weekends got a little more comfortable and a lot more crowded.

The green Beetle even made it onto the show floor: at InterClassics in Maastricht, and at the Keverwinterfestijn in the Autotron in Rosmalen. Not bad for a car that was never supposed to be ours.

As the family grew, the Beetle seemed to shrink. We needed something with more room.

We found it in The Hague: a 1972 Volkswagen T2 a/b camper.

When we arrived to look at it, there was an ANWB car parked right next to the bus — the Dutch roadside assistance. It is not, generally speaking, the welcome you hope for when you have come to see an old Volkswagen. Fortunately, it was only a flat battery.

We bought the bus and took it home to Limburg.

It has been in the family ever since. Since 2008, that T2 has seen almost all of the Netherlands.

I grew up inside KeverClub Nederland, regio Limburg. Over the years I went from being the kid who came along to being one of the people who make things happen — helping to organise events and building the club stands.

For more than ten years now, I have been part of the team that organises the Keverweekend in Schutterspark.

What stays with you from all of it is not only the cars. It is the people around them: the club, the weekends, the faces you see again every year. The cars are what bring everyone together. The people are why you keep coming back.

After Hessisch Oldendorf 2026 — HO26, to anyone who was there — I decided to start IDLE.

I had come to realise how many good memories from the automotive scene are lost over the years. Photographs disappear into old folders. Videos are forgotten. Stories are hardly ever written down at all. Almost everything in this article is the kind of memory that usually ends up exactly there.

IDLE is my attempt to change that.

It is meant to be a place where we capture and keep automotive culture: photography, film, event archives and personal stories. It comes from the aircooled Volkswagen world, because that is where I come from. But it is open to the wider automotive culture beyond it.

We capture. You remember.

More than twenty-five years after my father bought that orange Beetle, I am looking for a Volkswagen Beetle of my own. Properly looking, this time.

This story started with my father's Beetle. With a bit of luck, the next chapter starts with mine.