Nobody loved the air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle because it was fast. With a peak output hovering around 60 HP across 65 years of production, the thing moved roughly as urgently as a city bus. People loved it because it was cute. Harmless. The automotive equivalent of a golden retriever puppy. Which makes what Rodney Adams has done to one of them so spectacularly satisfying.
Adams runs RADesigns out of California, a restomod outfit with a single-minded obsession: taking air-cooled Beetles and turning them into machines you’d actually want to drive hard, not just park outside a vintage market on a Sunday morning. The shop can handle virtually anything built before the 1970s, and even sells forced-induction kits for air-cooled engines through its online store, RADesigns Performance.
Gone is the original flat-four and its non-synchromesh gearbox, a combination that made spirited driving feel like a negotiation. In its place sits a Subaru EJ25 2.5-liter boxer engine, the same unit that turned Subaru into a household name in JDM tuning circles across the U.S. during the ’90s. Paired with an RADesigns X30-660 turbocharger running 26 PSI of boost and an E85 ethanol tune, the little Bug puts down approximately 480 HP at the rear wheels.
With a power-to-weight ratio of roughly 550 HP per ton this Beetle weighs comically less than a Ferrari, rides on a wheelbase so short it could make a go-kart feel understated, and sends every one of those horses exclusively to the rear wheels. It also rides on performance suspension and four-wheel disc brakes, because Adams apparently believes in finishing what he starts. The transmission is a Type 2-derived unit that somehow ties the whole mechanical absurdity together.
The result is a car that could, in the hands of a competent driver, genuinely embarrass a modern 911 Carrera. Not a replica of performance. This is the real promise of the restomod: that a guy in a California shop with the right ideas can out-engineer billion-dollar manufacturers.
