During the 1960s and 1970s Volkswagen tried desperately to find successor products to the enormously popular Beetle. The Fastback estate car (also called the Variant) was only a limited success and it amplified the potentially dangerous handling qualities of the VW rear-engine set-up in a faster car. The front-engined, but lacklustre, K70 saloon, taken over from an NSU design, also achieved only modest sales and it seemed hard to switch existing VW fans from their loyalty to the quirky Beetle or to win new customers for newer, more conventional designs.
Bringing in Giorgetto Giugiaro (1938–) was an inspired move in breaking out of this impasse. Giugiaro had just made a great success of the Alfasud, which showed he was not only a master at designing beautiful, fantastical sports cars, but also soundly practical mass-market saloons. However, also crucial to his success with the Golf, and indeed to the entire success of Italdesign, was partner Aldo Mantovani (1927–), a deeply experienced body engineer who had spent 19 years at Fiat with legendary engineer Dante Giacosa (1905–96) during the postwar boom years when Fiat was leading the way in production design. Thanks to Mantovani’s involvement, Italdesign did not offer just exterior and interior designs, but a highly integrated engineering package that specified how the car was to be built, the design of the tooling, and a complete schedule for production.
The new Golf (initially sold as the Rabbit in the United States) was the complete antithesis of the Beetle. Gone were the baroque aerodynamics and curves, replaced by a crisp, fresh, geometric form around a ‘post-Issigonis’ ‘super-mini’ architecture. In one bound VW was free from the albatross of the ageing ‘people’s car’ tag. The Golf was a hit from the outset, becoming VW’s most important single product and the lynchpin of its rise to become Europe’s number-one carmaker. Though modernized and reinvented several times since then, VW understands that the Golf’s continuing evolution is a balancing act between the familiar and the novel, and each version still pays homage to Giugiaro’s design invention.
Crisp and almost perfect for the purpose. Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Golf let Volkswagen throw off the shackles of the quirky Beetle.