@BobPeters61 said:

Forgive the cluelessness of this question, but I was in my 20s when Transformers came out as a children's cartoon with a cool toy line. So I'm not familiar with the canon of this franchise.

I remember a few years ago a big to-do about a wreck on the set of a Transformers movie and that the Autobot named Bumblebee was a camaro in car form. (And easily totaled out as a stunt car, but I digress.) Now in this new movie he's a vintage VW Beetle. Can a transformer transform between different types of cars as well as between car and robot?

Well, this is kind of a reboot so I wouldn't worry about hard and fast rules. It's a silly franchise and not to be taken that seriously anyway.

The reason he is now a VW Beetle is because that's what he was in the original cartoon. The cartoon being popular in the 80s and this film now being set in the 80s. There was even an in-joke about the Beetle in the first Bay Transformers film.

Can they change into more than one vehicle? Yes they can. And no they can't. In the cartoon, when they lived on their planet they all changed into vehicles that suited that planet. When they came to earth they turned into vehicles that blended in with our planet. But they all kind of chose a vehicle and stuck with it. I believe the writers went by a unique method known as "making it up as they went along". Plus the transformers all went through revamps as the show went along anyway.

In the Cartoon they couldn't just scan a car and turn into it. Otherwise they would be turning something different ever week. That only in the Bayformers movies. He was named Bumblebee because he was a Volkswagen Beetle. Not a god damn Comerio. But you cant have someone driving average car in a Bayformers movies. But Bayformers movies feel like stupid a$$ car commercials anyways.

In the cartoon, the Transformers got their forms from their ship the Ark, which scanned what it thought was the indigenous life forms of the planet and gave both the Autobots and Decepticons those forms to disguise themselves. Both the Autobots and Decepticons were both on the ship at the time because they had been battling when the ship crashed.

The movie Transformers (or Bayformers) can scan any machine to turn into and disguise themselves at any time, though they tend to stick with a single form.