Twenty Years of Golfin'

It was twenty years ago today, May 25, 2000, that I took delivery of my first new car, a 2000 Volkswagen Golf, fourth generation.  I got it in indigo blue, as seen below.

Since then, I have gotten a second Golf - a 2012 model, sixth generation.  Still in good shape after more than eight years.

Strictly speaking, anything I write about the Volkswagen Golf should be on my Golf blog. even if that blog is specifically about the eighth-generation model, but this time it's personal.  I have an emotional connection to the Golf, just like most people around the world have.  It's practical, efficient, and fun, and it performs and handles ever than most compact cars and as well as some sports cars.  It's a car that fits my independent spirit, and I find pleasure in driving a Golf even when in heavy traffic or making mundane trips to the store.  I obviously enjoy taking it on road trips, as it makes the journey as entertaining as the destination.  During this pandemic, I make fewer trips than I normally do, and I savor any chance to drive it, even if it's just to go across town to mail something at the post office.  I felt a connection to my maternal grandfather, who loved cars and loved to drive, the day I got my first Golf.  It was thirty years to the day after he died.

The Golf is an everyman's car, and an everyman's car that delivers the  sophisticated ride and engineering usually associated with more expensive cars.  As Scott Keogh, the current CEO of Volkswagen of America, says,  Volkswagen has "always been the people's brand, which means it's accessible. It's available. It's approachable. And the fact that you could get great technology and great quality at this great approachable people's price. That's the core of Volkswagen."

And yet, mouthed piety aside, Volkswagen of America has apparently decided not to offer the base version of the eighth-generation Golf (below) for sale in the United States.

Despite the popularity of SUVs and the general disregard for hatchbacks in this country, Volkswagen loyalists have remained committed to the Golf for years, even if the causal customers Volkswagen of America has been chasing for so long have not.  It is true that VW sold only five thousand units of the outgoing seventh-generation Golf in 2019, but sales of the car have always bounced back strongly when a new generation of the model is introduced.  It appeals to the core of VW customers - the same VW customers like myself, the die-hard loyalists have kept VW in business in the U.S. at times when it was tottering on the edge of irrelevance, or even leaving the U.S. market together.  We still appreciate the practicality and the fun of Volkswagen's universal hatchback, even if other Americans don't.

My devotion to the Golf is strong and ongoing, after two decades of owning two of them.  So I regard Volkswagen's decision to sell only the more prohibitively expensive GTI and R performance variants of the Mark 8 Golf in this country as a slap in the face, especially when Volkswagen of America is pushing more crossovers and sport utility vehicles to pander to mass American tastes while leaving us core VW customers with even fewer choices of the sorts of European-style cars we want.  Not just with the loss of the base Golf, but also with the inability to buy the Golf-sized ID.3 electric hatchback.  This is all unacceptable.  This is not the Volkswagen of America that existed two decades ago, when I bought my first new car, my first liquid-cooled VW and my first Golf.  Volkswagen of America's turn to mass American taste violates the spirit of the brand, as Jamie Kitman explains so brilliantly in this article from the September 2019 issue of Automobile magazine.

I will remain a Volkswagen customer.  I will take my car to my dealer for service and replace mechanical and cosmetic parts when necessary to keep my car in tip-top shape.  But until I can buy a base Golf again, I will not buy a new Volkswagen now or in the future.