Volkswagen Lupo (1998-2005)
If you fancy a Bugatti Veyron but can’t afford one, then the Lupo is a much more pocket-friendly alternative and was styled by the same person – Czech stylist Josef Kaban. Launched to fill a gap vacated by the previous generation Polo, the Lupo took its name from the Latin word for Wolf, a nod to Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters in northern Germany, where the city car was assembled.
It was a small car, but a big styling diversion for Volkswagen, which had started to gather criticism for its over-conservative designs during the Nineties. VWS were decent cars that were extremely well screwed together, but were lacking in character.
The Lupo soon addressed that. Sharing much of its architecture with Spanish sister brand SEAT’S Arosa city car, the Lupo ended up with more in the way of styling flair than its Latin sibling. It’s clamshell-style bonnet and frog-like face gave it character, while it also came in a range of vibrant new colours, such as banana yellow or, like our test car, Fantasia Green – a shade of which BL would have been proud in 1979.
Offered with 1.0 or 1.4-litre engines, the latter was a bit of an eye-opener for the city car market at the time, with the 16v unit offering good mid-range acceleration and the cruising characteristics of a much bigger car – the Lupo is the best riding car of all the ones in this test and also the liveliest. Indeed, its perkiness didn’t go unnoticed by VW’S engineers, who brought a Lupo GTI along in 2001 with a 1.6-litre 125bhp powertrain. If ever you get the chance to try one, do – they understeer with abandon, but are truly hilarious to drive.
The 1.4 version tested here doesn’t come that far behind in the entertainment stakes, though its narrow tyres and lofty ride height limit the desire to press on. It’s a fantastic little car to drive around town, though, with a short-throw gearbox and eager acceleration. Maintenance is pretty straightforward, too, while Lupos tend to resist corrosion better than most Volkswagens of the era. Even with 126,000 miles on the clock, our test car was relatively rattle-free, while the interior fabrics are also hard wearing. Then there’s VW’S blue dashboard lighting that was very much the brand’s standout feature at the time – in the fashion-conscious turn-of-the-millennium era, such things were often what drove buyers into the showrooms. The Lupo’s biggest problem, for Volkswagen at least, was that it was expensive to build, partly down to it being constructed in Germany where labour costs were high. In 2005, the Wolfsburg plant was given over to producing the new Golf and the Lupo was replaced by the Brazilian-built VW Fox, a car that was inferior in many respects to its predecessor.