Do not adjust your sets, you have not stumbled onto the WhatCar? website by mistake. Despite what some might think, it’s not all just Porsche 911s round here. At Ti we are not proscriptive in the price, size or type of car we cover – sometimes we write stories that have nothing to do with cars at all. And at others we find ourselves with a question in such need of an answer, we have no choice but to go out and answer it ourselves. This being a case in point.
In its history, Volkswagen has produced two landmark cars: the Type 1 (aka Beetle) and Golf. The ID.3 was meant to be the third, but for reasons we’ll touch upon shortly, it didn’t quite work out that way. These weren’t merely anything as prosaic as good cars, in their own time they were cars that made the world change their view of family transport. And though there were highs and lows, we saw the Golf develop over four decades until at the end of 2016 it released the facelifted version of the seventh-generation car, the ‘Golf 7.5’ as it was known. I remember driving one on its launch and literally laughing at how brilliantly, extravagantly and almost certainly needlessly good it was. It didn’t beat the opposition because it wasn’t even playing the same game.
This was the very last Golf engineered in the era before Volkswagen had to slash its budgets, first to pay the billions in compensation owed as a result of the Dieselgate scandal, then to create the financial headroom required to completely reconfigure the business for the predicted double-fast march towards an all-EV future. Had VW known then the rather more leisurely pace at which that journey would actually be conducted, doubtless it would have spent more time getting the ID.3 right first go.
