The Volkswagen Golf Mk1 is the first generation of a small family car manufactured and marketed by Volkswagen. It was noteworthy for signalling Volkswagen's shift of its major car lines from rear-wheel drive and rear-mounted air-cooled engines to front-wheel drive with front-mounted, water-cooled engines that were often transversely-mounted.

The successor to Volkswagen's Beetle, the first generation Golf debuted in Europe in May 1974 with styling by Giorgetto Giugiaro's Italdesign. The car was sold as the Volkswagen Rabbit in the United States and Canada, and as the Caribe in Mexico.

History Replacing the Beetle; early efforts

Volkswagen began producing prototypes of possible Beetle replacements as far back as the early 1950s, and may have received design proposals from Porsche earlier than that. All of the internal projects' names started with "EA", standing for "Entwicklungsauftrag" ("Development assignment"). This work began during the tenure of Heinz Nordhoff, director general of Volkswagen from 1948 to 1968.

In 1952, the company built the EA41 in collaboration with Pininfarina. Essentially a rebodied Beetle, it never went into production.

The first EA47 prototype appeared in 1953; at least 11 more EA47 variations were built over the next three years.

By the mid- to late-1950s, questions about the future of the Beetle began to be asked from outside the company. In 1957, an article with the title "Is the Volkswagen dated?" appeared in the West German magazine Stern. Two years later, a similar headline was used in an article in Der Spiegel.

In 1958, Porsche began a project numbered 728 for a revised Beetle. A few years later, this became the Volkswagen EA53. This project continued for a number of years and produced several prototypes, with early ones having bodywork designed by Porsche and later ones styled by Ghia. The EA53 eventually led to the Type 3 model.

In 1957, another design study, the EA97, was started. This exercise was larger than the Beetle, but kept the usual rear-mounted powertrain. Two hundred instances of this design were built. Styling varied, depending on whether a particular car's bodywork was done by VW or by Ghia. Some cars’ looks echo the later Type 3 cars, although the EA97 was smaller. The last EA97 was built in 1960. The EA97 would provide the basis for the Brasília model from Volkswagen do Brasil.

The EA158 was a Beetle-successor project that started in 1962 with a unibody study by Pininfarina. As the project progressed, the car grew in size and weight. It was eventually rejected as a Beetle replacement, but served as the foundation of the subsequent Volkswagen Type 4 model.

In 1967, another set of prototypes for possible Beetle replacements appeared in the form of the EA235 and EA235a.

In 1968, the last internal prototype for a Beetle replacement built under Nordhoff's direction appeared. This car, designated EA276, was a small three-door hatchback with front-wheel drive using a front-mounted Volkswagen air-cooled engine. The EA276 program was cancelled after the death of Nordhoff, but found new life as the inspiration for the Brazilian Gol.

During Nordhoff's tenure, VW broadened its product line with the launch of the Volkswagen Type 3 in 1961 and the Volkswagen Type 4 in 1968. In 1964, the company acquired control of the Auto Union group from Daimler-Benz, and with it the technologies of the constituent companies of DKW, Horch, Audi and Wanderer.

Corporate changes and later prototypes Kurt Lotz succeeded Nordhoff as director general of Volkswagen from 1968 to 1971. Work to broaden the product line and find a replacement for the Beetle accelerated. Volkswagen acquired control of NSU in 1969. NSU was subsequently merged into the Auto Union group, which was then undergoing a renaissance under the relaunched Audi brand. One outcome of this acquisition was that the mid-sized front-wheel drive car that had been under development at NSU would reach the market, not as an NSU, but as the Volkswagen K70.

In 1968, another development project started, known as EA266. This project originated with Porsche, where it began as an internal project as early as 1966. This unusual design used a rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout with a water-cooled inline four cylinder engine laid over on its side and mounted longitudinally under the floor of the rear of the passenger compartment.

In 1969, a year after the start of work at Volkswagen on the EA266, another project, known as EA337, was commissioned. This project would draw on engines and front-wheel drive technology from the Audi division of Auto Union.

Entering difficult times In 1966, Volkswagen built almost 1.5 million automobiles and reported net profits of DM 300,000,000. By 1967, domestic sales had fallen to 370,000 units from a high of 600,000 units in 1965. A government-backed economic stimulus package was able to produce a rebound in sales. Beetle exports to the United States went from 232,550 in 1963 to 423,008 in 1968.

Local competitors Ford-Werke and Opel launched new small car models (the Escort and Kadett, respectively) targeted directly at Volkswagen's traditional market. Volkswagen's share of the German domestic car market dropped from 45% in 1960 to 26% in 1972. VW's profits fell from a high of DM 330,000,000 in 1969 to DM 12,000,000 in 1971, mainly due to slumping Beetle sales and high R&D costs.

In 1971, the United States government ended international convertibility of the US dollar to gold in what is termed the Nixon shock. One outcome of this was that the Deutsche Mark rose 40% against the US dollar in 1971. This, combined with a 10% import duty on cars entering the US, caused Beetle sales to plummet in what had become a critical market for Volkswagen. In 1973, the OPEC oil crisis hit, triggering a global recession. The German government responded with emergency measures banning private car use on certain days of the week and comprehensive speed limits.

In 1972, Opel's share of the German market rose to 20.4%, making them Germany's largest automobile manufacturer and overtaking Volkswagen in their domestic market. That same year, the Center for Auto Safety published "Small—on safety: the designed-in dangers of the Volkswagen", which examined the safety deficiencies of the Beetle just as Ralph Nader's earlier book Unsafe at Any Speed had done for the Chevrolet Corvair. All of the foregoing combined to result in Volkswagen posting a DM 807,000,000 loss in 1974. That same year, Volkswagen of America alone posted a DM 200,000,000 loss.

Rudolf Leiding replaced Lotz as director general of Volkswagen from 1971 to 1975. Commenting on the situation at Volkswagen as he found it, Leiding said: "The global situation for VW was more critical than we had once thought – to put it simply, we were dealing with the survival of a giant group, which employed more than 220,000 people worldwide ..." Two weeks after assuming the directorship, Leiding stopped work on the Porsche-designed EA266 and ordered all but two of the 50 prototypes built to that point to be disassembled.

In 1969, Lotz and Italian Volkswagen importer Gerhard R. Gumpert visited the Turin Auto Show. After selecting their six favourite cars of the show, they discovered that four of the six were designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro and his Italdesign studio. In January 1970, Giugiaro was invited to Wolfsburg to work on development project EA337. The first thing he saw when he arrived at VW's research centre was a Fiat 128, completely disassembled and labelled. The design brief provided by Volkswagen specified a C-segment car with a two-box body in three- and five-door versions. The client also provided Giugiaro with the basic dimensions and the power-train options. Giugiaro produced a design that reflected his signature "origami" or "folded-paper" style, emphasizing sharp corners and flat planes. Giugiaro would come to consider the Mk1 Golf the most important design of his career.

Early prototypes included rectangular headlamps and wide tail-lamp assemblies. At least one pre-production car was modified with a sliding side door. During development, candidates for the name of the new car included "Blizzard" and "Caribe", but these lost out to the final choice of "Golf". The origin of the name is variously attributed to the game of golf, the Gulf Stream current (German "Golfstrom") or the name of a horse.

Model history The Golf Mk1 received VW model designation Type 17. Production started in March 1974, and sales officially began in Europe in May of that year. By this time, Giugiaro's rectangular headlamps and wide tail-lamps had given way to round headlamps and much narrower rear lamps. On these earliest cars, the lower horizontal bodyline running under the tail-lamps on the rear hatch dropped down in the location of the rear license plate. This feature has been dubbed "Swallowtail" by some Golf enthusiasts. The surface between the raised sides on the bonnet on early cars also blended smoothly into the leading edge.

The Golf was not the first example of Giugiaro's work for Volkswagen to reach production. His design for the first generation Passat was released in 1973, and the first generation Scirocco, a Giugiaro design prepared concurrently with the Golf, was released months ahead of the Golf.

From 2 October 1974 to 14 January 1975, two Golf Mk1s were driven over from Fairbanks, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego as a test of their durability.

The right-hand drive Golf went on sale in the United Kingdom in October 1974. For the 1975 sales year, it was the 14th best-selling car in the UK, with more than 19,000 units sold. In 1981, the facelifted Golf GTI was voted Car of the Year by What Car? magazine, ahead of new models like the Austin Metro and MK3 Ford Escort. In its final sales year of 1983, it sold more than 25,000 units, and was the UK's 14th best-selling car, despite being almost 10 years old.

Air conditioning became available as an option on the domestic market in August 1975. The ability to retrofit the system, together with installing a larger battery, was offered to owners of existing cars.

In December 1975, a minor styling revision deleted the Swallowtail line on the rear hatch, replacing it with a simple straight horizontal body-line. The bonnet also received a transverse line connecting the two raised sides across the front edge of the panel.

The Golf was introduced to Japan in 1975, where it was imported by the Yanase dealership chain. Its exterior dimensions and engine displacement were in compliance with Japanese Government dimension regulations.

The Golf Mk1 was runner-up for European Car of the Year in 1975, losing to the Citroën CX.

A minor exterior revision in December 1978 replaced the narrow front and rear bumpers with moulded units that wrapped around the sides of the car. Another minor facelift in 1980 saw the adoption of wider rear lamp clusters and a new dashboard with a more modern-looking instrument display featuring LED warning lights. US versions also received rectangular headlights. This was the last major update before the Mk1 was replaced by the Mk2 Golf in most markets in September 1983 and in the UK in March 1984.

The Golf was West Germany's best selling new car for much of its production life, and was among the most successful cars in the whole of Europe during its nine-year production run.

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