Volkswagen Golf Mk1
touring car
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.
The public source identifies “Volkswagen Golf Mk1” as touring car. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Volkswagen, Golf and touring.
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This entry incorporates text from “Volkswagen Golf Mk1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.