Left: cover still from an Instagram reel by @metalmorphosiscars. Right: A teal Volkswagen Beetle on a road (Unsplash photo by Wes Hicks).

A video from the build shop behind @metalmorphosiscars shows the finished “Botanical Beetle,” a pastel pink 1967 Volkswagen Beetle with hand-painted metallic flower decals, alongside a caption announcing round two: “We are building another Botanical Beetle very similar to this one right now and you could win it for Christmas! Visit charity beetle dot com or comment ‘win maggie’ and we’ll DM you the link.” The clip drew 167,000 likes, 16,700 comments, and 3,289 shares.

There’s a reason the original Beetle is the platform builders keep coming back to for this kind of showpiece transformation: Volkswagen built 21,529,464 of them before production finally ended in 2003 at the company’s Puebla, Mexico plant, more units of a single platform than any other car ever made. That 65-year production run means parts, panels, and donor cars are still plentiful and cheap compared to almost any other classic, which is exactly what makes a full custom build, strip a rusted shell down to bare metal, respray it in a custom color, and hand-paint flower artwork across the body, financially realistic in a way it simply isn’t on a rarer classic.

That affordability doesn’t mean the labor is cheap, though. General restoration cost guides put paint work alone anywhere from $500 for a basic respray up to $20,000 for show-level custom paint, and a build with this much hand-applied decal and artwork detail sits firmly on the expensive end of that range. Add metalwork to cut out the rust a 1967 Beetle inevitably has after nearly six decades, typically billed around $30 an hour and running well past $20,000 on a bad shell, and it becomes clear why a shop would build a second copy for a giveaway rather than simply selling it outright: the build cost alone justifies treating the finished car as a marketing centerpiece.

The giveaway structure also explains why the comment section exploded past 16,000 responses. Asking for a specific comment, “win maggie”, to unlock a DM link is a proven way to spike engagement on a platform that rewards exactly that kind of interaction, and pairing it with a car this visually distinct, there’s no mistaking a flower-covered pink Beetle for anything else on a timeline, turns an ordinary giveaway post into something people actually want to screenshot and share. The real Beetle in the video did the hard work; the second one is just there to keep the story going into Christmas.

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