Winners of Oprah Winfrey's 'Ultimate Favorite Things' Meet Their Beetles
On Thursday morning, 21 people assembled in Orland Park, Ill., a southwest suburb of Chicago, to receive the keys to their 2012 Volkswagen Beetles. The cars were among 276 promised last November as surprise gifts to attendees at a special Ultimate Favorite Things studio taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, now discontinued.
Ms. Winfrey did not attend Thursdays event, but Jonathan Browning, the chief executive of Volkswagen of America, was on hand to reprise many of the talking points that brand executives have used to describe the redesigned Beetle, which is positioned as more masculine than its predecessor.
Though the crowd on Thursday, and indeed, the audience at last Novembers taping, was mostly women, Volkswagens publicity staff offered a male attendee for an interview.
Leonardo Gilbert, 52, is the pastor of the Sheldon Heights Church of Christ in Chicago. How did he regard the new car?
As a blessing, he said via telephone. It is going to be a blessing in this economy. I will use it as a second car, for errands and things.
Blessing or not, Mr. Gilbert initially had misgivings about hi! s good f ortune. The studio audience was privy only to a view of the new cars silhouette at the taping, and present in the studio was the cars more rounded predecessor, the New Beetle. Mr. Gilbert could not see himself in that car, he said, and was not sure about the new one until he picked a color silver.
A lot of the ladies have red. I cant do red. Silver, O.K., he said. Audience members were given a choice of Reflex Silver, Denim Blue, Saturn Yellow and Tornado Red.
At first I was nervous, Mr. Gilbert added. I wasnt sure this was a car a pastor could drive around the South Side of Chicago in, you know? I thought I might have to give it away. Well, I gave it to me.
The cars macho redesign ultimately pleased Mr. Gilbert. Once I sat in it, it has a different feel about it, he said. There is a certain manliness to it. The shape is straightened out. It is definitely wider, less of a bubble than it used to be.
Oprah producers and Volkswagen took care to shoulder the tax liability for the new cars, having learned from an earlier Favorite Things giveaway, where recipients of a new Pontiac G6 sedan were hit with tax bills of roughly $7,000 apiece.
Thursdays event took place as Beetles, now referred to simply as all-new, rather than New, in VWs advertising, arrived at dealerships across the country.