01 April 2014

40 years of the Volkswagen Golf

This year, it's 40 years of the iconic hatchback. The Volkswagen Golf.

THE Golf has been hugely successful for Volkswagen since the MK1 arrived back in 1974. Fast forward 40 years, it has become Europe's best selling car, and also one of the world's best selling cars since it replaced the Beetle.

What shouldn't be forgotten though, is that the Golf was VW's saviour. It was the car that played a major role in turning round VW's fortunes. It has been and always will be an important car for its maker.

Volkswagen were keen to get the Beetle replacement in development throughout the 1960s. By then, the Beetle was already an ancient car, as it was still in production for over two decades. Despite that the Beetle was still selling reasonably well.

Into the 1970s, VW were losing sales. As the appeal of the Beetle waned, rival makers were making more practical and sophisticated cars, but also sold cars on what markets demanded. As reliable and rugged the Beetle was, that wasn't enough.

The original Golf was a crucially important car for Volkswagen upon its launch in 1974. It was the car to make or break the company. Like the Beetle, the Golf was billed to be the people's car. The one for the motoring masses.

The Golf was a breakaway from tradition of the cars Volkswagen made from before. An understated hatchback, with a clean and crisp design styled by Giorgetto Guigaro from ItalDesign. A major breakaway from the curvaecous designs. The real masterstroke from Guigaro was not that he only designed a car that's practical, one that's also aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Besides the sharp and fresh exterior, under the skin, the Golf was a front engined, front wheel-drive hatchback, with  transversely-mounted watercooled engines. It was also a hatchback which had a practcal tailgate. Back then, a front wheel drive hatchback was something of a novelty.

This type of car soon caught on, as it became the norm of small family cars that rival manufacturers began making their own cars to rival the Golf. It could be said that Volkswagen pioneered the small family hatchback.

Volkswagen enjoyed success with the original Golf and hit off from the word go. Having said that, the legendary GTi boosted its profile - and its popularity. The recipe was simple. An everyday car that the performance and the thrills you'd get from a sports but in a car that was practical and more attainable. That spawned a new niche of car, the Hot Hatch. It was big a hit, but also a goldmine for VW, that the Golf GTi was soon immitated by other manufacturers.

Four decades later, there has been six incarnations of the Golf that followed on. Over the years, Volkswagen have tweaked the Golf, and the car has evolved over the past four decades. Over time, it's become a motoring icon. It's been a huge success for them. To date, VW have sold around 30million examples - and it's already outsold the Beetle by around 10million units. So that makes the Golf in being VW's best seller.

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