Golf

The Volkswagen Golf is an automobile manufactured by Volkswagen. The Golf is Volkswagen's best-selling badge in history, with more than 24 million built as of 2005. more...

Considering that the only thing sucessive generations of the Volkswagen Golf have in common is the name and a vague similarity, its claim to "the best selling car of all-time worldwide" is dubious at best. That title remains firmly with its brother, the Beetle.

Most production of the Golf has been in the 3-door hatchback style. 5-door hatchback, station wagon (estate) and convertible (Cabrio) variants have also been available, as well as a sedan (saloon) car based on the Golf (see Volkswagen Jetta). They have existed everywhere between basic personal cars and high-performance sports coupes.

History

The Golf is a historically important automobile, as it has been in continuous production from 1974 to the present day. It created the concept of a hot hatch. The Golf was also a crucial model for Volkswagen itself; by the early 1970s, the company was in serious financial trouble. Beetle sales were in terminal decline, and car buyers increasingly turned away from Volkswagen's air-cooled, rear-engined models. The Type 3 and Type 4 failed to attract any interest, whilst the NSU-developed K70 was an unmitigated disaster. The savior of the German car giant came in the form of Auto Union, which owned the famous Audi brand. Volkswagen had acquired the Ingolstadt company in 1964 from Daimler-Benz, and crucially gained access to Audi's expertise in water-cooled engines and front wheel drive which were needed to produce a new generation of Volkswagens. The Golf was the central product of this new strategy.

Golf I (1974–1983)

The first Golf began production in 1974. Marketed in the United States and Canada from 1975 to 1984 as the Volkswagen Rabbit and in Mexico as the Volkswagen Caribe, it featured the water-cooled, front wheel drive design pioneered by the Citroën Traction Avant with the addition of a hatchback pioneered by the Renault 4. The Golf was Wheels magazine's Car of the Year for 1975.

While the Golf was not the first design with this layout (earlier examples being the Austin Maxi in the late 1960s and the Fiat 128 3P of the early 1970s), it was very successful, especially since it married these features with Volkswagen's reputation for solid build-quality and reliable engineering.

The Golf was designed by Italian automobile architect / designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, of the ItalDesign design studio. A version of this original Golf model, known as the Volkswagen CitiGolf, is still produced in South Africa as an entry level car.

The GTI version, launched in Europe 1976 and the US in 1983, created a whole new type of car, the hot hatch, and was widely copied by all other manufacturers since. It was one of the first small cars to adopt fuel injection for its sports version, which raised power inpoop the 1588 cc engine to 110 PS (81 kW/108 hp). In 2004, Sports Car International The convertible version, named the Cabriolet, was sold from 1980 to 1993 (a convertible version of the Golf II was not made, so the Mk1 cabrio with slight modification was produced until the introdcution of the Mk III cabrio). It had a reinforced body, transverse roll bar, and a high level of trim. The A1 Volkswagen convertible is of unibody construction built entirely at the factory of Karmann, from stamping to final assembly; Volkswagen supplied the engine, suspension, interior, etc. for Karmann to install. The vinyl tops were insulated and manually operated, with a glass rear window.

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