Jeff Siegrist couldn’t take his mind off the car he sold in 1996. So he set out to track it down.
3 min
Locals in Pawleys Island have a special affection for classic vehicles. The coastal South Carolina town is home to many nostalgic retirees, and on weekends its streets see plenty of restored ‘60s-era muscle cars.
Of all the classics motoring past Parlor Doughnuts on Ocean Highway, none has captured the community’s attention like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Volkswagen.
“Everybody in town rubber necks and waves when this Beetle drives by,” says Rev. Wil Keith, a 47-year-old priest. “It’s one of the much-adored cars in our little town right now.”
It is a 1971 red Super Beetle and its story is special.
Jeff Siegrist was a student at the University of Tennessee when he first set eyes on her at a Knoxville dealership.
Siegrist pounced, handing over his father’s old Ford Falcon and $2,278.54 for the Bug. He kicked in $67.45 for an AM radio and $5.95 for a cigarette lighter.
“So that was my car from that day forward,” says Siegrist, an executive search consultant specialising in the forest products industry.
The Beetle was a sales phenomenon and a pop-culture hit that ushered in the era of mass European auto imports. It was also a Hollywood star, thanks to Herbie from the “Love Bug” movie franchise.
Siegrist road-tripped his Beetle all over. When he met his future wife, Mary, he took her on a first date in the red Bug. When the couple had their first child, the baby boy came home in the backseat.
“It was part of the family,” says Siegrist. Mary gave the car its name, around Christmas time in 1972: Rudolph.
The couple had two more children and ultimately sold the car in 1996. “It just wasn’t practical anymore,” he says. “There were tears in my eyes.”
Up to this point, the story isn’t much different from many of the more than 21.5 million original Beetles that Volkswagen sold.
But during the pandemic, things got interesting.
“I kept thinking, ‘Boy, I wish I knew where my old Beetle was,’” says Siegrist. “I wondered whether other people loved it the way my wife and I did.”
Eventually he got serious. He dug up the car’s original bill of sale, which had a vehicle identification number. He had sold the car to someone in Georgia, a quarter century earlier.
So he called the Georgia department of motor vehicles. Turns out the car was still registered and on the road. But that’s all the office would say.
Siegrist got an attorney involved. Two weeks later, the lawyer called with a name and a phone number for a woman he believed to be the current owner. So Siegrist called.
“I was shocked,” says Tracy Swift, who teaches dental hygiene at Albany State University in Georgia. “He started the conversation with, ‘You’re going to find this phone call very weird.’” Swift thought she had a stalker, and recalls Siegrist saying, “I’m not crazy, I promise. Just let me tell you my story.”
Swift did drive a 1971 Beetle. She checked the VIN number and it was a match.
Siegrist traveled to Georgia, met Swift at her office, and drove the car in the parking lot. “I didn’t want to sell the car,” she says, “but because of his story, I felt like it needed to go back to its owner. It was the sweetest story.”
They agreed on a price (he says “many times over the original cost”) and the car showed up on a truck in Siegrist’s driveway days later. It was just before Christmas in 2022.
The first thing Siegrist and his wife did was drive around the block, with tears in their eyes. “Rudolph is back!” his wife yelled as they drove.
Siegrist went digging in a bucket full of coins and junk for a key chain. At the bottom, he found Rudolph’s original key. He didn’t remember saving it.
The Beetle needed restoration. So Siegrist asked advice from someone he trusted. Enter Keith, the rector at Siegrist’s church.
“When you’re at church,” Keith says, “and the service is over and everyone is filing out, that’s when folks share, often, important information about their lives.”
Keith, it turns out, had grown up the son of a car restorer and worked on cars himself in his garage. He was not a professional. He worried if he would have enough time. But a parishioner needed help. How could he say no?
It took about a year. “Aside from the paint and some engine work,” Keith says, “I ended up doing more than I was expecting, with no complaints whatsoever. In some ways, it was like I gained a parishioner. Only it was a car.”
In 2024, Siegrist began driving Rudolph around Pawleys Island. “Rarely can I go anywhere where somebody doesn’t stop me,” he says.
“Because probably 50% of the people of my generation have owned a Beetle or have had an adventure in a Beetle. People want to know the car’s story. So I tell it.”
As for Keith, he says, “It’s a point of pride that I had a hand in it.” Like most classic car stories, this one continues.
“As soon as Jeff stops finding little things for me to fix, then the story will be over,” he says. “But he keeps finding things for me to do! Which I don’t mind one bit.”
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
