The “Teotihuacan VW Bug” will be inaugurated this Thursday in Wolfsburg, Germany, where Volkswagen AG's headquarters are located, as well as the world's biggest car plant, as part of the Mexico-Germany Dual Year “Alliance for the Future.”
The car was decorated with Teotihuacan motifs in the San Marín de las Pirámides arts and crafts workshop.
The Volkswagen Beetle manufactured in 1994 at the Mexican plant was decorated with a total of 19,800 semiprecious stones, which included obsidian, jade and aventurine quartz.
The painstaking process of placing and polishing the semiprecious stones took two years and nine months to complete, according to the director of the piece, Héctor Garnelo Navarro. Interestingly, the added pieces increased the car's overall weight by 480 pounds.
Garnelo worked with a team of five people and finished the piece in 2015. Since its completing, the VW Beetle pays homage to prehispanic culture as well as Mexico's long tradition of arts and crafts.
A portion of the proceeds will benefit a foundation for children with cancer. This car is one of five cars that formed part of the “Obsidian VW Beetles” project.
The five cars are different and each one was intended to pay homage to one of Mexico's five greatest prehispanic civilizations: the Mayans, Olmec, Toltec, Aztecs and Teotihuacan.
The car will be unveiled by Otto Ferdinand Wachs, the director of the Autostadt, which is a visitor attraction adjacent to the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Héctor Garnelo Navarro will attend the piece's inauguration, as well as Wolfsburg's mayor, Elke Braun, and head of business affairs at Mexico's embassy in Germany, Alejandro Rivera.
