81 years is a good long run but I’m gonna miss seeing these on the road.
Me too! My family had a red one when I was a kid - in the late 60s. At the time we had 5 people in the family plus a dog and a cat. We’d head up to the cabin with all of us (pets incl) and a week’s worth of groceries and clothes packed in that Beetle! I’m not sure how my mom did it - I remember we had stuff under our feet, one sister was in the boot, one sister was probably sitting on my mom’s lap (no car seats or seat belts back then). Great times! I’m sure my mother would beg to differ.
Punch a Bug! I learned to drive stick in a '66 Beetle.
The Beetle stopped being made in 2003.
The rounded-off Cabriolet isn’t remotely the same car.
I thought I saw something quite a while back that the faux-Beetle was already dead. It just had nothing going for it. Fun fact: if you round off a car body there’s less room inside. And this is a plus for whom?
FtG: former owner of a 1969 bug.
That is a shame. I had a 73 beetle many years ago and I felt so special tootling around in it. Flashing the peace sign at other VW drivers, it was like being part of a special club. I wonder what it will do to the value of the new models.
The article I linked in the OP does say that production in Mexico stopped in 2003; I assumed there must be another plant that was still working. I checked and the Wikipedia article supports the 2003 date. If they stopped making them 16 years ago, why is the article telling us that they are stopping now? 
The first sentence in the linked article is:
Wikipedia says:
So this isn’t the Type 1? What were they making in Puebla last week?
The “Final Edition.” Not ominous sounding at all…
Me, too.
I even persuaded my dad to put flower decals on it to “hippie-fy” it.
Well they are bringing back the VW Bus
I think they’ve promised to bring back the bus almost as many times as they’ve ended production of the beetle.
The “old”, rear-engine, air-cooled Beetle was produced until 2003. It was not sold in the U.S. or Canada after 1979.
The front-wheel-drive New Beetle was introduced in 1997. So, for a while, the original Beetle and the New Beetle were in production at the same time, but sold in different markets.
The New Beetle was redesigned in 2011 and renamed simply Beetle. That’s the version ending production now.
Meh. All we need to do is wait, like, 5 years and it’ll make a glorious and marketing-friendly comeback.
Thank you! I really appreciate you clearing things up; the Wikipedia article didn’t mention all that.
Maybe, but it’ll be known as the Classic Beetle.
Considering the origin of the Beetle, there’s something hilarious about that choice of words.
In the 80s I bought a '69 VW microbus form a fellow who had been using it as a garbage shed. I drove several hundred yards before it exploded.
I then towed it the rest of the way home and let it sit for about a decade, when a young fellow knocked on my door and offered to buy it. I got as much as I had paid for it ($800). He towed it away, saying that he would rebuild it and drive it to Mexico.
I learned to drive a stick shift in my brother’s early-70’s beetle. It would die if you took your foot completely off the gas, so I had to work the clutch and the brake with my left foot.
No more “slug bug”. 
This time as an EV, so perhaps it’ll be different. After the Dieselgate thing, I’ve heard that VW has been eager to make up for it by moving to EVs. I think they lost a lot of market share because of that mess.
I saw an original[sup]1[/sup] Beetle on the road just the other day. I was bicycling, so I didn’t have anyone to slug. Not that I would do that kind of thing anymore. BTW, when I was a kid, we inverted that phrase to “bug slug”. I didn’t hear “slug bug” until much later.
[sup]1[/sup] If I did still do that kind of thing, I would only do it for the original, not the faux bug.
I went to Woodstock in a Beetle… along with 4 others, one of whom was morbidly obese. I think I arrived with some broken ribs.