It just means ‘People’s Car’, and yet Volkswagen signifies so much more. There’s no shortage of rivals with reliable, cheap utilitarianism at their core, but few have managed to unite counter-culture hippies and surfers with City yuppies and boy racers within their embrace. There’s every chance your first car was a battered Golf – the same thing Prince Michael of Kent uses as a runabout. To investigate this curiously classless appeal, we have gathered six VW icons. There’s the Beetle that began it all, and the Camper that kick-started the ownership cult. The Karmann-Ghia made a glamorous push upmarket, a theme that hit its zenith with the Corrado VR6. And then there’s the Golf GTI, the car that defined the hot hatch. We’ve also included a Lupo GTI, which proved that there was virtue in going back to basics after years of growth. So which will convert us to the cult of VW, and how do you buy your way in? Time to take the wheel and find out.
Remember that time we invited the air-cooled kids from T2D along to the UK’s premier water-cooled show with their Brasilia and they won Best of Show? Well, they’re back pushing the boundaries ones again…
After the hype of the Kyzer/ Prior design collaboration MK2 Golf that featured in our 25th Anniversary issue earlier this year, the team at JP-Performance could have been forgiven for pressing pause for a while. However, it’s on to the next level for those guys as their Gran Turismo inspired Beetle breaks cover…
