Golf tees up for a great new drive
The VW Golf is officially middle-aged but remains a royal on the road because it’s the ultimate driver’s car
WHAT makes a car a classic? Is it the looks, the way it drives, the feelings it evokes, or a combination of all these things? Personally, I drive at least 60 different cars every year, and have done so for 18 years now for columns in this newspaper and in the Irish Daily Mail, which means I’ve sat behind over a thousand steering wheels, and yet there’s still a special thrill when a new generation of an old favourite arrives.
Hardly surprisingly, one of my favourites is the Volkswagen Golf, a perennial bestseller here, fifth on the individual model table last year and top of the pile as recently as 2015. Admittedly, I especially like it in its scorching hatch GTI guise, but even the entry-level models always impress for one reason – the handling. The Golf is a driver’s car, make no mistake, and from humble beginnings it has risen to become the third bestselling car in history.
Friday saw the 45th anniversary of the production of the first Golf that rolled off the assembly line in Wolfsburg. A lot was riding on its success, because the plant up to that point was building the Beetle, a car that first saw light of day in 1938 and became a nameplate that finally will disappear this year after 81 years (though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it reappeared on a VW fully electric car sometime in the future).
Dr Stefan Loth, the plant manager at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg says: ‘In 1974, our employees were facing the challenge of switching from the Beetle to the Golf. Since then, we have consistently continued to develop our main plant and today, in addition to the Golf, we produce the e-Golf, the Golf GTE2, the Golf Sportsvan, and three additional models.’
Progress was swift. By July 1974, the car was in showrooms, and deliveries to the first customers began in August.
The Mark 1, though, was nothing like as powerful as the car we know today. Available as either a two- or four door model with a boot lid, it came with two different engines. The first was a 1.1-litre four-cylinder petrol that offered just 49 horsepower and had a maximum speed of 140kph. The second engine offering was a 1.5-litre petrol with
69hp and a top speed of 160kph. By comparison, today’s Mk VII Golf 1.0-litre TSI three-cylinder engine delivers 85hp and a top speed of 180kph.
The original cars came with fourspeed manual gearboxes or threespeed automatic transmissions, and proved an instant hit. After 45 years, some 35million have been sold. A new Golf has been ordered somewhere in the world every 41 seconds, every day, without interruption, since the start of production, an average of around 780,000 vehicles per year. That’s more than the number of Beetles that were sold in the lifetime of the car, though still a way behind the Toyota Corolla, which debuted in 1966 and had sold over 46million units by 2018.
We never will see those numbers again for new cars launched now. The market is too fragmented for any one car to gain such an iconic foothold, and with combustion engines on the way out and electric cars on the way in, the industry is in for the biggest shake-up since the Model T Ford brought motoring to the masses.
Hardly surprisingly, the Golf is hugely important to VW. ‘It is at the very heart of our brand,’ says chief operating officer Ralf Brandstätter. ‘It stands for progress and technology like no other car. For example, the Golf made safety technology affordable for millions of people for the first time. Thanks to this, it made its mark on an entire generation.
‘For seven generations [of the car, not humans!], the Golf has made a contribution to the development of Volkswagen as a brand and as a group into one of the most important automotive producers in the world.’
The statistics on that speak for themselves. Volkswagen cars are sold in more than 150 markets throughout the world, and far from being exclusive to Wolfsburg, VWs now are produced at over 50 locations in 14 countries. In 2017, Volkswagen delivered 6.24million vehicles through its network of 10,000 dealerships.
As was the case with the Beetle, known as the Bug in the United States, and by the translation of the word ‘beetle’ elsewhere (the Coccinelle in France, the Maggiolino in
Italy), the Golf also has different names. It was sold as the Rabbit in the US and Canada, and as the Caribe in Mexico. It was named World Car of the Year in 2009 (the Mk6) and again in 2013 with the current Mk7, and also is one of only three cars to be named European Car of the Year twice, in 1992 and 2013 (the others are the Opel Astra and Renault Clio).
The most powerful built is the Golf R, which comes with a 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol engine that puts out 296hp and has been recorded hitting 100kph from a launch start in just 4.5 seconds.
That’s a long way from the first car that rolled out of Wolfsburg, and it’s a sign that after 45 years, we still love the Golf because Volkswagen keeps innovating, keeps making it better, and improves on the handling, ride and suspension.
Above all, it knows that a huge element of automotive desire is emotional, and the Golf continues to push all those buttons for the drivers who have stayed loyal to it generation after generation.
THE GOLF MADE SAFETY TECHNOLOGY AFFORDABLE FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, AND SO MADE ITS MARK ON AN ENTIRE GENERATION