True German automotive chic is not limited to Mercedes, BMW or Audi. In a less elitist and more sober register, the Volkswagen Golf has managed to express with a certain elegance and on a large scale the quintessence of the modern bourgeois car.
For just fifty years, this mid-size model, produced in 37 million units – most of them in the historic factory in Wolfsburg (Lower Saxony), Germany – has demonstrated that a car does not need to do too much to be desirable and that its ability to reflect the position of its owner in society also depends on what the English call theunderstatement (the euphemism).
More socially valued outside than within its German borders, the Golf occupies a special place in the automotive history of the last half-century. Its appearance in 1974 sealed a risky bet. The brand, which had been practicing the Beetle monoculture for three decades, decided to rely on a vehicle as square as its predecessor was rounded and to adopt a rear hatch. It abandoned the traditional flat-cylinder engine installed at the rear for an in-line four-cylinder and front-wheel drive. It was a revolution at Volkswagen.
Versatile and refined small car
Faced with competitors called Renault 5, Peugeot 106, Simca 1 100 or Fiat 128, the first generation of the Golf – a nod to GolfstromGerman translation of the Gulf Stream ocean current – is committed to its reliability and manufacturing quality. Its doors do not produce a tinny sound when slammed and there is no hearing the usual small parasitic noises, so frequent on board models of the time. The presentation, on the other hand, is of a desperate austerity.
In the years that followed, the Golf would build a reputation as a versatile and refined small car. Its seriousness is impressive and its simple forms are pleasing. She also displays a rare talent for advancing her pawns into new territories. The black Golf becomes the object of desire par excellence for “young dynamic executives”. She poses her man and a mixture of dynamism and respectability emerges.
As the 1980s approach, the GTI version will imbue the Golf with an aura of sportiness which will boost its sales and raise its image – and its prices – upwards. The small, trendy sedan exists as a quiet urban or as an extrovert bomb, but also as a convertible or station wagon and offers powerful diesel engines. Its equipment is regularly enriched – in 2002 it was the first to adopt double clutch technology which will boost sales of automatic gearboxes – and its interior layout is becoming more refined. The exterior design, entrusted to the Italian Giorgetto Giugiaro for the first Golf in 1974, was taken up by the house stylists and asserted itself over the generations.
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