DESIGNERS, I bet you don’t drive a Volkswagen Golf. You
should, of course, because when you look at it you will reflect admiringly at
all its virtues and how it doesn’t put a foot wrong. We recognize the thought
of the line and the feat of the quality. It is a superb, clear, timeless design.
More likely you will have something secondhand; a manual,
rear wheel drive and preferably rear engine. It might have a large engine, it
might even have space for more that two people. Chances are there will be
something odd-ball about it. A character superseded or something that
represents an impossibility in today’s designs. ‘Of course, you couldn’t do
that now’ you say, as you point out the pop-up headlamps et al.
Point at aspects of the Golf, and there are parts you are
told you cannot do today, yet somehow the Golf does. How does it achieve that
crisp cant-rail, look at that knife-point tail-lamp dart towards the wheel-arch.
Parallel cut-lines and doors that open to any point. That was on the BMW
7-series a scant generation ago! Make no mistake, the Golf is everything you
need, and possibly most of what you want.
If you’re a single young professional male, that is. If you
have offspring, then that marks you out as a family man, and you might find
more to quibble about. I won’t go into features and usability, but the intent
of an object ought to be visible in its aesthetic. Those lean, fat
free-surfaces might represent urban gym-going ambitions, but they do not
represent the fulsome nourishment of a young family, or the selfless generosity
one realizes with the onset of offspring.
That bodyside marks an obsessive pursuit of a super-lean ideal,
to the point where it becomes slightly detached from the familial objective.
Yes, all designs are at some point an indulgence for the designer, and perhaps
the solution the Mk7 Golf is the most modern appropriate solution, but there is
a neat fullness achieved by the Mark 6 that is not here. A car once classless
and sexless has compromised maternity for masculinity. The family car just got
divorced.
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