7 ❚ VOLKSWAGEN ❚
VW at its best brings boldness to the mainstream
1 The flying start
Born in 1938, and in production for 65 years including a long afterlife in Mexico, the original Beetle was a simple rear-engined car designed to get the German people mobile, like the later Fiat 500 in Italy and the Mini in the UK. It ended up becoming a global cult, selling more than 20 million and getting rebooted as an uninspiring Golf-based pastiche.
2 The birth of ‘lifestyle’
Launched in 1950 and with us ever since, the Transporter is the world’s best-selling van, but has achieved that partly by transcending the whole idea of ‘van’. It’s been favoured by surfers and brickies alike, and VW was very early to cotton on to the advantages of cooperating with outside experts who wanted to customise them.
3 The perfect car
Don’t be blinded by the fact that the Golf GTI is an icon on many fronts and a big seller over 46 years: there was nothing safe or predictable about hotting up a family hatch, giving it feelsome dynamics, and fitting it with tartan upholstery and a golf-ball gearknob. Like the Audi Quattro, it was created by visionary employees working in their own time.
4 The big-engine phase
Like the Beatles with the White Album, VW in the early ’00s was not at its most coherent and instead seemed to be trialling all sorts of possible futures, most of which involved big, weird engines. So we had the Phaeton W12, the W8-engined Passat and the Touareg Mk1 with a V10 diesel engine, making the related Porsche Cayenne look tame.
5 The visitor from a parallel universe
Long-reigning VW chief Ferdinand Piëch’s many obsessions included extreme economy. Weirdest, and most prescient, of his pet projects was 2013’s limited-production, high-priced XL1. A streamlined, lightweig
