Hi I'm John Tedesco.
I'm his dad.
And we're the creators
of the RZR 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle.
My entire life, since I was born,
my dad's always been working on something.
In the garage at home,
he was always building different cars,
so it was pretty hard for me
not to just fall in love with it.
People who ask me what this thing is,
it depends who they are.
But I tell them that it's a 2020 RZR 1000 S
with a 1972 Super Beetle on top of it.
It's actually very highly illegal
to drive a UTV on the street where we live.
I wanted a RZR my entire life,
but I couldn't wrap my head around
spending that much money
for a vehicle I could only drive off-road.
The only way you could drive a UTV
on the street where we live
is to make it into something else.
Did you think it was going to work or not work?
We knew it was going to work,
it just, how was it going to look,
how was it going to fit on there?
John: So, the first step is to buy a RZR,
take it completely apart of the plastics.
So you go down to the bare frame
and the roll bars, just the inner plastics.
And then you have to invest in a Beetle.
So the reason we went with such an old Beetle
is because in New Jersey,
which is probably similar to other states,
a vehicle over 25 years or older
doesn't have to go through inspection.
The loophole that lets you drive a RZR on the street
is taking the VIN
in the title of something else
and putting it on a RZR 1000 S.
So we found it in Toms River, down the shore.
We went there and it was an older automotive shop,
so the Bug was under, like,
probably 6 inches of water.
Luckily we got a good deal on it,
and also the water helped,
'cause we were kicking the water around
and were trying to get a better deal for it.
And then just go to town with a Sawzall,
just cut it all apart.
The more you cut, the less weight you have of it,
the better it's going to be.
So we got it mounted to the RZR,
and then it was more of the cosmetic stuff.
So we went on eBay,
got 18-wheeler fenders, sliced them up,
put cardboard cutouts to measure it,
then we cut up the 18-wheeler fenders,
welded those onto the body.
They are so thin metal, to a point where
we were having trouble welding to it
'cause we would burn right through.
So we put a
stock Super ATV bumper,
and we riveted it to the hood of the Volkswagen Bug.
It also connects to the fenders that we created,
the 18-wheeler fenders.
There was no rules.
There's no rules on any of this stuff;
you just try to figure it out.
Me and my dad are not professional fabricators,
professional mechanics.
We're just two average people
who have a pretty good idea
around vehicles, around cars,
and we just kept on cutting things off.
We would weld it; if we didn't like it,
we'd cut it off, weld it.
It was definitely a team effort.
After the metalwork, we sanded it all down,
we put door glass,
kind of filling any holes, any dents
to make the body as smooth as we can.
And then we primed it, and then we used
a bed liner on it usually used for trucks.
It's called Raptor liner, and it has a tint of color,
so you can tint it and make any color you want.
We went for pretty obnoxious colors
because we want people to know
that we're going down the street,
going down the trails.
From there, it's just little cosmetic parts
that give it character. So,
we did light bars, LED rock lights.
To make it street-legal,
you need to have a street-legal kit on it.
So it's a horn,
lights,
and turn signals.
To do the build process took us about six months.
The entire time me and my dad were like,
"I don't know if we're gonna be able to do this."
The motivation, it wasn't there.
Like, every day we started working on it,
some days were really good, some days we were like,
"Oh, we're definitely gonna do this."
And some days we were like,
"We might want to just cut it off
and put it back to a RZR."
We built this thing to ride,
so I'm not going to say that we ride it very gentle.
We beat it pretty good. It's made to ride;
that's why we have a lot of fun with it.
So we've driven it in the snow,
over a foot of snow, ripping around.
Sand, we've driven it in the sand
in the Pine Barrens, no issues.
We've driven it in mud,
we've driven it in a flood,
we've driven on pavement,
we've driven it through mud holes.
You can literally do anything besides fly.
You can tell it's very much for off-road
when you're driving on the road.
A lot of the weight is in the rear,
so when you hit it it kind of does articulate up,
so you kind of feel like you're doing a wheelie
sometimes when you're driving if you hit it really hard.
Plus, you can start going down the street,
and you see woods, poof.
You hang a right, and just go right into it.
It's just crazy how well these things handle off-road
and how fast they go.
You can go over whoops and bumps
and things that you kind of clench
'cause you think it's going to hurt,
and it's like a cloud, like nothing.
A stock RZR is 1,200 pounds,
a little over 1,200 pounds.
On our local truck scale,
it was 1,800 pounds, so about 600 pounds.
And most of that is probably from the tires.
On the highway I got up to 75 miles an hour.
I didn't keep it at that speed for that long,
there's only a couple trails we're going that fast on,
most of the time we're going
40, 50 miles an hour.
I posted a video of my Bug, went to bed,
woke up the next morning, I had 100,000 views.
Posted a more detailed video
about the build process and how I did it,
went to bed, woke up,
I had over a million views on the video.
It's at a certain point now where
we have to stop on the trail and talk to people,
because they jump in front of it and wave us down.
We feel like we're celebrities,
and we're very much not celebrities.
And then we also want to keep on building them.
So after mine, my dad got the bug of it,
literally, no pun intended,
got the bug of it and created his own.
And then I want to create another one,
just to continue the build process,
continue to gain following.
How do you feel how this turned out?
Pretty good.
That's a terrible response.
Give something good!
I think we're both
pretty pleasantly surprised how it turned out.
We did not think
we were going to get the result that we have.
Yeah.