Volkswagen Golf Country: the lifted Golf Europe laughed at, built where they make the G-Wagen Every Volkswagen showroom in America is now full of tall hatchbacks with plastic fender trim and all-wheel drive badges, and nobody thinks twice about it. In 1990, Volkswagen tried selling exactly that idea in Europe, and Europe laughed it out … Read more
Ferdinand Piëch’s Bugatti Volkswagen gave up on selling the Phaeton in North America after the 2006 model year, with around 3,500 found homes in three years. Analysts at Bernstein Research later worked out that the big sedan lost €28,101 on every unit sold worldwide between 2002 and 2012, and that the Bugatti Veyron lost about … Read more
Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk4: the GTI that went soft, and the R32 that made up for it The Mk4 is the GTI Americans bought by the truckload and enthusiasts still can’t quite forgive. Volkswagen sold it here from 1999 to 2005, it put VW back on the map in the United States, it had an … Read more
Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk2 and Mk3: Pennsylvania’s GTI, the weight problem and the VR6 America got the second-generation GTI before it ever got a car called Golf GTI. Volkswagen of America sold it simply as the “GTI”, a model of its own, and some of the early ones were bolted together in a factory in … Read more
Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk1: the bootleg hot hatch America bought as a Rabbit from Pennsylvania In 1982 Volkswagen of America was in trouble. Rabbit sales that year were down a devastating 44 percent on the year before, according to the Christian Science Monitor, and the cheap, clever little hatchback that was supposed to replace the … Read more
Ecolomafia: your lungs have a price America fired the shot. Not a European regulator. Not a Brussels commissioner with a mandate and a press office. A federal agency in Washington, working from test data, put a notice of violation on the desk of the largest carmaker on the planet in September 2015 and blew open … Read more
VW Scirocco: the handsome brother who went first to take the bullets for the Golf This year everyone celebrated the Volkswagen Golf’s fiftieth birthday. Fair enough: it’s one of the most important cars ever built, the one that saved Volkswagen, the one that invented a whole class. But there’s something almost nobody mentions while the … Read more
German Auto Industry Crisis: The Hangover, Wolfsburg Edition The suite is destroyed. There’s a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a mattress speared on a statue outside, and a stolen LVPD cruiser sitting in the valet lane. Four guys on the floor, none of them remember anything, one is missing a tooth, … Read more
Golf Cabriolet Mk1: Seven Let’s get one thing straight before we start: I’m about to spoil the ending of Se7en. If you haven’t seen it, close this, go watch it, come back. I’ll wait. You’ve had since 1995. Still here? Good. Here’s what makes that film a masterpiece instead of a cheap shocker. John Doe … Read more
GOLF R32: BACK WHEN VOLKSWAGEN STILL TOOK RISKS Chris Harris said it once and it stuck: the trouble with modern hot hatches is that they all feel like the same car wearing different jackets. He was talking about the latest Golf R when he said it, but he could have been talking about any of … Read more
Bentley: the Man Who Built the World’s Fastest Lorries It all started with a paperweight. An aluminum paperweight sitting on a desk in a French office. That single object changed British military aviation, Le Mans history, and the luxury car industry forever. Because Walter Owen Bentley wasn’t a businessman playing at making cars. He was … Read more
Porsche 356: The Car That Started a Religion Before the 911 became the centre of the Porsche universe, before the Turbo became a status symbol and the GT3 became a track day weapon, there was a small, rounded, Beetle-derived sports car that looked like it had been sculpted by the wind itself. The Porsche 356 … Read more
