I think a number of us attained our driver’s licence driving a Volkswagen Beetle and as such, it has an element of nostalgia and good memories associated with it. I was excited at the prospect of building one - despite the high price charged. However, as I was soon to discover, this kit is definitely not worth the money charged.

 

At the time of purchase, I did not know that the Italeri 1/24 VW 1303S Beetle kit released in 2016 was in fact is simply a re-release of a very old kit that was originally produced by Imai, and later by Aoshima.

 

It had place for a motor and a battery with very sparse interior details. Italeri did not remove the option for batteries and a motor and simply added seats on top of the box that would house these. Being someone who likes detail, this 53-piece (including the wheel polyclips) kit did not go down well with me, and then the price paid came back to haunt me, and I really wasn’t very happy and realised that I should have researched the kit before having bought it.

Because the seats rest on the battery and motor box, they are out of proportion, very visible and definitely do not do justice to the interior at all! Initially, I planned to complete this build eactly like the one that I had used for my driver's licence, but this state of affairs changed my mind and I opted to go for heavily tinted windows, with just the slightest detail visible from the outside.

(Yes, that's my leg). 

The axle and steering mechanism are in line with that of a toy and provides robustness for a child to be able to push the vehicle along the ground if it has no motor.  Scale was deinitely not an important consideration in the design of this kit! The further I continued with the build, the more dissapointed I became. I soldiered on. 

The windows section had a really bad crack in it, along with some nasty chips. I am not sure whether this was due to bad packaging, handling or manufacture. I know that I did cause that!

 

Nonetheless, it was challening to remove the chips and thankfully, the crack was hidden by the side pillar.

The decals and intructions were however of acceptable quality with enough variety to allow for the model country to be represented in different ways.

 

The quality of the dashboard was also acceptible. 

To hide as much of the inside as possible, I painted the insides black.

Italeri 1/24 VW 1303s Beetle

Completed April 2018