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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Hard times is a-comin', and it's time to prepare for life on the move! The global economic meltdown doesn't mean you have to take a break from Hell Projects. In fact, it's more important than ever that you break out your Hell Project skills in order to give you and your'n an edge when it comes time to hit the road in search of work, handouts, escape from rampaging urban mobs, etc… and that means building a vehicle that can haul you, your loved ones, and a large percentage of your personal possessions around the land. We're talking pots and pans, crates of squawking chickens, and mattresses strapped to the outside of the vehicle here, with maybe Grandma lashing down the spare engine with bungee cords as you horse-trade some crafty yokel for a sack of cornmeal to feed your white liquor still. Sure, you could just buy a diesel Econoline...
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newVideoPlayer("/84_VW_Rabbit_476.flv", 506, 423,""); While many mid-80s VW buyers were satisfied with a plain ol' Kleine GTI , others were willing to take extreme measures to get their hands on the Wolfsburg Edition Rabbit. Yes, climbing up on a moving car transporter was totally worth it , considering you'd get such features as a cassette deck and cool emblems.
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to check out a car that proves what a small world this really is; I was over at the parents' place the other day- yeah, I'm still on speaking terms with them in spite of having been given a girl's name, since it's that name that's given me the gravel in my gut and the spit in my eye- and my mom asked, "Have you seen that race car parked down the street?" Race car? Sure enough, parked about five doors down from my childhood home, here's the El Moto Loco VW Golf from the 24 Hours Of LeMons SF race in May. One day you're scraping fenders with a car on the race track, and a few months later it's lowering the property values in your parents' neighborhood! These guys had some great Lucha Libre costumes, and they'd probably have made a run at People's Choice if it hadn't been...
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newVideoPlayer("/87_VW_GTI_476.flv", 506, 423,""); VW's "Kleine GTI" series of ads, starting in 1984 , was still going strong three years later. Those crazy Wolfsburgers went and doubled the number of valves for that year, giving America's Members Only -clad sorority girls 123 rampaging German horses under the hood.
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newVideoPlayer("/84_VW_GTI_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Yes, it's a German version of the 1964 Ronnie And The Daytonas song "Little GTO," and while the '84 GTI had a throttle body instead of three deuces and an extra gear on the transmission, it was just like the GTO! This ad came out around the time that the Reagan Administration said it was cool to show total hoonage in car ads again (after a moratorium on car-ad jumps and burnouts that lasted through most of the Malaise Era). These things sold like crazy in California, but by now most of them have disappeared.
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After all these months of DOTS, we've only seen two water-cooled VWs (a Rabbitamino and a Quantum ). The island is buzzing with air-cooled Beetles (so many, in fact, that I could probably show nothing but Type 1s in this series for a solid month), but what happened to all those Rabbits? They used to be everywhere! And let's not even talk about Dashers and Sciroccos. So, I've been keeping a lookout for vintage water-cooled Wolfsburg machinery, and was rewarded with a few more Rabbitaminos and this 4-door '83 Rabbit. VW ditched the Rabbit nameplate for North American Golfs after the 1984 model year, so this is one of the last of the original Rabbits. I did my high-school driver training in a very loose dual-brake-pedal 70s Rabbit... which, come to think of it, was the last time I've driven a Golf of any sort. The LS Rabbit for 1983 came with 74 fuel-injected horses... which wasn't all that bad for a Late Malaise Era subcompact. Of course, 74 horses coupled with an...
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