“The historian,” wrote Frederich Von Schlegel, “is a prophet looking backwards.” We certainly made more than our share of predictions in the ’90s; we were right about some, wrong about others, and downright embarrassed by a few. Here are a half-dozen of our 1990s projections and their eventual outcomes.
1990: Volkswagen Should Bring Back the Beetle
In his June 1990 column, editor Jack Nerad recounted a chat with a Volkswagen PR rep who fretted about the company’s sinking market share. Nerad’s suggestion: Bring back the Beetle. “Volkswagen has lost its reputation for low-cost, reliable ‘transportation’ cars to the Japanese and Koreans,” he wrote. The PR man? “I wasn’t proposing the reintroduction of a several-decades-old model,” Nerad said. “I was suggesting fresh, modern mechanicals under a Beetle skin. They didn’t think much of this idea, either.”
