There has been a few times, and they’ve stuck with me, that I would look down at the dash and all three dials would be pointed directly ahead.
Really they point directly up, but I like to think it is ahead.

The smallest gauge on the left was for fuel, and it seemed to perpetually indicate I had around half a tank left.

The speedometer hovered around 70 miles per hour for the lion’s share of the journey and with cruise control set it rarely wavered from its 12 o’clock setting.

And the tachometer matched the pace of the speedo, and at 70 miles an hour the little engine would be spinning her guts out at a rate of around 3300 revolutions per minute.

Driving in the centre lane of a three lane highway I smiled as I drove through Orlando and past Disney World, glancing at the dials which were arranged in a sort of inverse Mickey Mouse head formation, using the dash to placate any worries I had that forward and further away was not the direction I should be heading.

In reality, the dials are probably designed as a caricature of the car itself, given how much character the VW Beetle has garnered over the years, and how much it relied upon sentimentality when they released the new models in the late 1990s.

And what with my innate pretentiousness constantly bubbling away, I was probably rebelling against that sentimentality and cringing slightly at the idea of driving around the US with it hanging over me that I went for an inverse Mickey Mouse. Much less sentimental. Dickhead.

But after 3,000 miles, damn near 5,000 kilometres in the new money, I’ve entertained the thought of never driving anything else in my life with fairly worrying conviction.

Aside from the built in character of the new Beetle, my particular model, which was apparently the first of the new models off the assembly line in Cincinnati in 1998, has plenty of character from bits falling off.

There is no air conditioning, so climate is sweating-your-tits-off with the windows up, or sweating-your-tits-off with a nice breeze but zero conversation as wind rushing by at 70 miles an hour sucks all human interactions back out on to the highway.

The passenger side window switch also fell out of the door the other day, so if you’re in the passenger seat you’ll need to voice your climate requirements.
The stereo volume control is also questionable, as it doesn’t work, turn it a little more, doesn’t work, turn it a little more, doesn’t work, turn it a li- MAX VOLUME OH GOD TURN IT OFF.

The ceiling cloth has also lost all contact with the body of the car, and is held up with a combination of thumb tacks and bulldog clips, both of which fail at more than 100 kilometres an hour.

But those three dials are still pointing dead ahead, leading me and all that character around these great United States of America, and I will continue to follow their lead.