The VW Golf was introduced into the U.S. in 1975 as the Rabbit. It looked like the rejected offspring of a stalwart Volvo and a dull Honda. Read: Small and boxy. It was a fuel-efficient, compact car for people who didn’t want to go Japanese. These people were the auto-buying version of punks. Or at least vegans. The Rabbit was supposedly a success but the only people who drove it in pre-cable TV Littleton, Colorado were college professors and … college professors. After cable TV, Depeche Mode and Robin Leach, yuppies who couldn’t afford BMWs also started driving the convertible version – at least it was German.
Then I went to Germany as an exchange student and discovered someone had taken a compact car and made it into a station wagon. They’d taken a car with not very much room and added not very much room more. You could maybe fit a medium-sized wiener dog in the back or go to the bowling alley with your wife and actually take both balls (jokes on me, Germans don’t bowl). The VW Rabbit station wagon – or Golf Combi, as the Krauts say – seemed like a car that never needed to be invented and yet there it was. In fact, in Wegberg, Germany, there a lot of them were. Magic.
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