2012 Volkswagen Beetle: A Bug With a Rampaging Y Chromosome

2012 Volkswagen Beetle.

Masculine, masculine, masculine. Klaus Bischoff, head of design for the Volkswagen brand, kept returning to the word to describe the design of the successor to the New Beetle, the car Volkswagen calls simply “the 21st century Beetle.”

On Monday morning, the car was unveiled in Manhattan inside a huge metal warehouse near the Manhattan Bridge. Near-simultaneous unveilings occurred in Shanghai and Berlin.

The terrariumlike setting was inspired by a Volkswagen advertisement that ran during the Super Bowl last February, featuring a six-legged beetle speed-drifting across a jungle floor, past ants and praying mantises.

The screens of static jungle views — intermittently enlivened by dragon flies, earwigs and ants in motion — finally lifted, revealing a cloth-covered Beetle. Then, with a crinkling, cracking sound, the carapacelike cover appeared to fracture and fell away.

Underneath was a black Beetle; red and white examples were later rolled out.

This car is the not the new New Beetle. Indeed, VW brand custodians could have called it Not the New Beetle, so eager were they to put the cutesy image of the previous model behind it.

Jonathan Browning, head of Volkswagen North America, played soft cop, talking up the classic nature of the older Beetle design — “you don’t change such a car on a whim” — while a scowling Mr. Bischoff talked it down.

“We started from scratch,” he said of the design, which was undertaken in mid-2007. “We wanted to give it a whole new character. We wanted to make a dynamic, sportier, more masculine car.”

Jamie Mccarthy/Getty Images Klaus Bischoff, the Volkswagen design chief, discusses the redesigned Beetle on Monday in New York.

The car abandons the formal simplicity of the New Beetle, with its three, interlocking semicircles. That layout produced a high roof — Volkswagen called it a “cathedral ceiling,” while Ferdinand Piech, the brand’s former chief executive, once called it womblike — but also an awkward allocation of interior space.

Instead, the designers revisited the profile of Ferdinand Porsche’s original car, Mr. Bischoff said. “We had an original in the studio,” he noted. The front hood was made longer and the windshield shifted backward and given a steeper incline. Over all, the car is 3.3 inches wider, a half inch lower and 6 inches longer than its predecessor.

The critical differences are visible in the car’s profile. It can be seen in the pattern of what designers call the graphic of the glass and C-pillar — the portion directly behind the doors — and in the rear fender, which has been noticeably stretched. Replacing the circular taillights of the old model are two U-shaped lights. A chrome-accented bar near the rockers emphasizes the car’s increased length.

Most of all, Mr. Bischoff said, what makes the car look more macho is its wheels — striking 10-spoke wheels up to 19 inches in diameter. Big wheels are masculine, and VW designers subscribed to the conventional thinking here.

The exterior design team was headed by Marc Lichte. The interior team, directed by Tomasz Bachorski, provided a treatment that slightly dialed back the cute factor, with generous swatches of exterior color, gracefully blending the interior and exterior. Ambient lighting, meanwhile, is available in a choice of white, red or blue.

Perhaps most indicative of the Beetle’s personality shift, a row of analog instrumentation rises from the dash just inches from where the bygone flower vase was positioned. “More power, less flower,” Mr. Bischoff quipped.

Luca De Meo, the Volkswagen director of marketing, boasted of the car’s XDS traction control system, available on the top-end TSI model. “It makes it sporty like the Herbie in the movie,” he said, referring to the original Beetle’s star turn in a series of campy films. He called the TSI, with its 2-liter, 200-horsepower turbocharged engine, “a GTI that is different, for the ‘I have a Mac’ person.” (When asked later to clarify the association, he explained that he was referencing the I.B.M. person/Mac person advertisements.)

Aside from the TSI, other engines include a 2.5-liter 5-cylinder good for 170 horsepower and a 2-liter turbodiesel with 140 horsepower and 236 pound-feet of torque. The diesel is rated at 29 m.p.g. in urban driving and 40 m.p.g. on the highway.

The original Beetle sold 23 million units, 6 million of them in the United States. This one is already guaranteed to studio-audience members of an “Oprah Winfrey Show” taping held last year, during which Ms. Winfrey previewed the car’s silhouette.

Mr. De Meo said he would be happy if the split between male and female buyers were closer to 50-50. According to TrueCar, a Web site that examines car-buying trends, nearly 61 percent of 2010 New Beetle purchasers were women.