Ralph Guglielm and a buddy had brought a spare coil, a fresh battery, a fuel pump, and some good gas up into the Boulder Creek woods, because they knew a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle was sitting there, abandoned between a couple's breakup. The shift linkage was broken and the coil had gone bad. The price for the 80's Baja converted Beetle was just fifteen hundred dollars. Getting it running cost less than a hundred more.
Second was where the broken linkage had left it, and there was no roadside fix so Ralph and his buddy drove the car down Highway 9 stuck in second the whole way into Santa Cruz, slip-shifting through neutral with the clutch every time they needed to slow down.
That car is in his garage now, painted as Herbie, number 53, with a red, white, and blue stripe down the middle. He calls it an underdog and uses the word a lot. "The car brings out a good side in me," he says. "I think I bring out a good side in the car."
Ralph's aunt, worked at the Library of Congress for most of her life. She never married, never had kids, and stayed close to Ralph's family as an extension of it. She traveled everywhere: safari in Africa, a cruise toward Antarctica to see something rare that only the brave bothered with. She told him something when he was twelve that he didn't think much of at the time. "The answer is always no, unless you ask." He filed it and went back to being twelve.
He had spent most of his twenties doing the version of life that didn't take dice rolls. There were stints at brake shops and a Jiffy Lube, some part sales work, and a run through corporate America that was supposed to pay off in raises and recognition that mostly didn't show up. The Beetle sat through all of it as a hobby, going on small adventures and getting cosmetic fixes and being a car he liked but didn't push too much. The dream of a real shop, the kind built around the first Fast and Furious movie's idea of what a garage should be, floated next to the car. Neither moved much.
She passed a few years ago. Which is what brought the line back. "You gotta live it," he says. "It could be so boring you walk out and a vending machine falls on you, or you could be going sideways on ice next to million dollar hypercars. You never know unless you roll the dice." Rennvolks Garage opened in Santa Cruz a little over a year ago. The space had a tall enough roll-up door and the zoning allowed automotive, which in Santa Cruz is most of the battle. A small list of clients followed him in, and the Beetle came with him.
In 2025 he and the car got invited to the inaugural Safari Party rally in Utah. The Bug held up well enough to suggest there was more in it than anyone had been asking for, including him. He came home and started writing emails. The period-correct Jackman wheels that had been on the car since the 80s build looked great and were also bent into shapes the original wheel inventor had never sketched. He emailed Method Race Wheels and his friend Dave at Vannigan Life. Dave built a full aluminum roof rack with a mount for a full-size spare. The car was suddenly a real thing instead of a yard project.
Then he applied to Fat Ice, a race on a frozen lake in Montana with a curated field of legends and hypercars, and showed up to it in a sixty-year-old air-cooled Beetle. "It was probably the least amount of horsepower and least amount of money on that car in that event," he says. The Bug has no factory heater, so before he left he wedged a Chinese diesel RV heater into the cabin, the kind that lives on a hundred-dollar Amazon listing. At Fat Ice he was in a t-shirt while everyone around him shivered, kids climbed on the car between sessions, and the door executed a known early Beetle flaw by flying open at speed.
Along the way he's run into three or four generations of people who all recognize the car and don't agree on what it means. Some remember the original Disney films from the 60s, others the Lindsay Lohan reboot from the mid-2000s, others the cartoons in the 90s. The car carries something a little different to each of them, and he gets out and lets them climb in.
Driving the Bug, in his words, is a go-kart on crack. It has no brake booster, no ABS, and no power steering. "It's the most analog feel possible," he says. You wind out every gear until it sings, then look down and see forty-two miles an hour. Soccer-mom minivans pass him waving. He says he's never been flipped off in traffic, even when the car has stalled at a green light, because everybody loves the love bug.
There's a decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird rotting in the desert near Willow Springs that Ralph saw as a kid, when his dad worked at Honda and would take him out there to break test cars on the company's dime. The engineers behind the Blackbird charted flight paths off the stars at Mach 3, with slide rules and the kind of mainframes that filled rooms.
Sixty years on, the headline feature in a new car is Apple CarPlay. "What happened to purists and speed and risk and enjoying the drive?" Ralph says. "It takes out the risk of the adventure."
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Photography by: Paolo Lekai
