This gray monster is a real Volkswagen New Beetle RSi, one of only 250 examples made, and the only one in China. I found it in October 2016 on a car-repair market in Dongba, in the far east of Beijing. The great Beetle was dirty and dusty, and apparently abandoned.
The market was of the crappy kind, with most businesses repairing crappy trucks. It was sure no place for an ultra rare super Beetle. How the heck did it get there..?
The Volkswagen Beetle RSi was manufactured from 2001 until 2003 in a limited run of 250 cars. It was not just a New Beetle with a spoiler set, it was a serious piece of work.
The Volkswagen Beetle RSi centered around the engine: a manic 3.2 liter VR6, good for 225 hp and 320 Nm. To put that into comparison: the next-most powerful New Beetle was the 2.3 V5, with 170 hp and 220 Nm.
The RSi’s engine was mated to a 6-speed manual, sending power to all wheels via Volkswagen’s 4motion four-wheel drive system.
The suspension was tuned and strengthened, there was a rear-cross brace behind the rear seats, 8 centimeter wider fenders, unique front and rear bumpers, a new front air dam, a rear diffuser, a rear-window wing, a large rear wing, Remus exhaust pipes, and OZ Superturismo wheels with 18 inch tires.
Top speed was 230 kilometers per hour, and 0-100 was gone in 6.3 seconds.
The interior was unique as well, with Recaro racing seats, and orange and aluminum trim. The radio moved to the ceiling, it’s place in the center stack taken up by a trio of extra dials.
The gear lever is housed in a round frame, and topped of by a knob with RSi and 4Motion badging.
The rear bench is orange too, and lighter and smaller than the standard bench. The seat in the middle was deleted.
Two wings..?
That’s two wings!
I always loved the Beetle RSi, for its looks and craziness. I have the AutoArt 1:18. So seeing this thing in Beijing was just incredible great. But again, how did this rare Volkswagen end up at this crappy market?
To find out more I shipped the photos to my friend Ali Khahili, who worked for Volkswagen China. He responded almost immediately, saying he did know the car very well, and… had driven it around in Beijing.
He told me that the RSi was imported by Volkswagen China in 2012, to promote the launch of the Volkswagen R-Line in the country.
Interestingly, the silver RSi was purchased from the office of the legendary Ferdinand Piech, after he had resigned from Volkswagen. Piech really liked the RSi. He also personally owned a blue example, which has ended up in the Volkswagen Museum.
The RSi was not homologated for the Chinese market, so it was imported as a so called ‘display and demonstration car’. This means a vehicle can only be used for auto shows, and for demonstration runs on a track or a closed road.
There is a time limit to it too. If the exhibition or demonstration is over, the car has to be shipped back to where it came from. However, some at Volkswagen wanted to keep the RSi after its agreed display-demonstration period was over, and they managed to get a temporarily license plate for it, which meant the monster RSi was suddenly road legal!
It was in this moment in time that my friend Ali got his chance to drive the RSi, on public roads around the Volkswagen headquarters in Beijing.
The rood-mounted radio, with an RSi logo, and the clock on the lucky 13:13 time.
The plague in on the center tunnel, stating this particular car was 164 out of 250. Note the button to open the rear door, with the diagram shaped just like a New Beetle! I love this kind of attention for detail.
The original additional German-language manual for the RSi.
The manic six, with another RSi logo on the engine cover. With the i in red.
The RSi in the Sanlitun area, looking so speedy!
What happened next is still a bit murky. Volkswagen managed to extend the temporarily license plate for half a year more, but after that they apparently didn’t get permission for another extension.
So in theory, they had to ship it back to Germany. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the RSi was parked in the underground lot under the VW building, where it lingered for a while, until it was almost forgotten. Almost. And then it suddenly appeared…
… above the door of the 8MM Club in Beijing, just a short distance away from the Volkswagen building.
The poor car stood on a makeshift ramp above the entrance, as if it were some cheap tuned-up Toyota painted in shiny pink to get some attention to some shady business!
It is still unclear how the RSi ended up there. Did somebody at Volkswagen sell the car to the club’s owner? Technically, that would be a difficult deal, because an exhibition/demonstration car, or any car on a temporarily license plate, cannot be legally sold to somebody else.
Skipping a few months: at one moment, the RSi and ramp suddenly disappeared from above the club’s door, and the car was assumed gone forever. Until I found it in Dongba in October 2016.
After Ali told me all this I went back to the market to make 100% sure it was indeed the same car:
Second visit. After some rain. Poor Beetle looked rather dirty. But it mattered not. Because:
There it was, 164 out of 250. Same car all right.
This is the temporarily license plate. It was on the rear bench. Top left, the owner: Volkswagen Group China. Left low: the date of import: 2013/08/09. Top right: port of entry: Tianjin. Left second from above: type of car: Volkswagen Beetle 3200CC small sedan. The fact that they call it a sedan has to do with the complicated Chinese classification system, which I will discuss in more detail on these pages at a later moment in time.
I shipped the new pictures to Ali. We were now convinced it was indeed the same car, and a few weeks later Ali and me went to see the car together:
Third visit, with Ali, in late October 2016. The poor RSi was even dirtier again, and blocked from getting out from every side. But we were lucky, because after some asking around we met a little lady who knew the owner of the car. She was kind enough to give this gentleman’s telephone number.
Ali called and out of the blue asked if it was for sale. The owner didn’t really say yes or no. Over the next week or so Ali tried again, his wife tried, my wife tried, but to not much avail. The man on the other side of the line was vague about questions of ownership, and said he didn’t want to sell the RSi to anyone.
Then one day, in early 2017, when I passed by again, I noticed that the car had disappeared. Nobody knew whereto. Some time after that, the entire market disappeared. This, strange as it may sound, it quite common in China, where entire places can disappear overnight.
Ali had since moved to Germany, still working for Volkswagen. He felt very bad when I told him the sorry news. We thought the Beetle RSi had gone dark on us, probably forever. But we were wrong.
More than one year later, in May 2018, this picture appeared in one of my many car-centric WeChat groups. That surely looked like the same car!
I asked the picture’s poster where it was, and he said it was in the underground parking lot of the Fortune Mall in Beijing.
I was a bit busy so it took me a while to go for it. But when I finally had time earlier this week it was worth every second, because there…
… in a very dark corner of the parking lost was our lost New Beetle RSi. It was almost as if I met an old friend. Happily, the car appeared to be in a very good shape. It had been cleaned up and the tires were full of air.
A great Beetle RSi!
It was too dark for a proper picture with my iPhone, but with the flashlight on I could easily see the number in the tunnel: 164 out of 250, it was the same car yet again.
It is here that this story ends, for now, because we haven’t been able to find out how the RSi got from the 8MM to Dongba to Fortune Plaza. I will update this story as soon as we find out more.
This car needs to be back on the road again, no matter where.
If you have any information about this rare Beetle, please let us know in the comments below, or send us a message.
The man who apparantly owned the Beetle for at least a while had a few other interesting cars. More on those in a later story!
This was a fun read, and I love the RSi. Currently 3D modelling it for later sale.