The Volkswagen Golf, now in its fifth incarnation, has been with us for 30 years. And what storied decades those have been. In that time, the mother and father of all hatchbacks aimed to become the Beetle of its era, and ended up outselling it. Twenty-two million Volks have bought this Wagen. And though in many respects the Golf is as middle-class as pesto, those people have come from all kinds of social groups with all kinds of needs.
The standard two-door model has, for instance, aroused the interest of every estate agent in the land at some point in his or her career. Young families with safety issues have bought the four-doors. When he was at Chelsea, the footballer Graeme Le Saux had one with a funky set of ski clips on the roof. (Are footballers allowed to ski? Whatever. It looked good.) Meanwhile, the GTi versions were busily catering for sales reps with poor disciplinary records and underage hotwirers. You could argue that the sport of ram-raiding would never have come into existence without the GTi. In this and other respects, the Golf is one of those cars that can be said to have genuinely tilted the culture.
I once owned a Golf myself. It was a 1.8 model in a particularly nasty shade of blue, with three billion miles on the clock and a detachable cassette player, and I bought it off a policeman, naively trusting that, because he was a policeman, it didn't really matter that he couldn't produce the car's log book or service history. And my faith in the integrity of our forces of law and order was entirely justified, because that car brought me nothing but unalloyed, fault-free motoring bliss until the day its chassis got irreparably bent in a head-on collision with a BMW (his fault), and I had to watch a recovery vehicle tow it away to be broken down for scrap or, in all likelihood, reconditioned and sent back out again with a different registration plate. (This was in Essex.) Either way, I missed that car the way that people claim to miss departed dogs, right until the cheque came through from the insurers.
When the new Golf arrived at my house last week, I toyed briefly with the idea of going out to find a BMW to drive it into, principally to get some kind of gauge on the latest model's improved chassis strength, and also, of course, for old time's sake. Sadly, this time, no BMW pulled out in front of me at quite the right moment, so we'll have to take VW's word for the degree of structural bolstering on the new Golf. Certainly the car now comes - as my old one didn't - with a hearteningly broad spread of airbags, front, side and head. At the merest whiff of an impact, the cabin is going to look like a quilting convention.
The wrap-around rear window and subtle back spoiler bring the Golf more into line with space-age developments elsewhere, but the slightly dumpy shape is unchanged bar some minimal expansion all round. The selling points are gizmos imported from the cars further up the VW range, such as a big VW badge on the boot that doubles as a button for the hatch (and cannot easily be chiselled out and worn as a medallion by retro rap fans). It also comes with a set of tricksy windscreen wipers. "Three post-wash cycles are automatically performed after the windscreen washer system is activated. A further post-wash cycle is performed five seconds after the last wash/wipe cycle." Laugh? I nearly threw in some clothes.
The 2.0-litre diesel engine was fast and smooth, the six-speed gearbox tidy and uncomplicated. No other hatchback feels this solidly put together; in no other hatchback do you drive accompanied by the sweet sound of screws refusing to come undone.
Now, clearly in the Golf's lifetime the market has come alive in ostensibly more exciting ways. People who might once have bought a hatchback can now be tempted by adaptable miniature people carriers, with countless seats that come out and go back in 8,500 configurations.
In the Golf, your back seats don't do anything except tip forward when you want to fill the back with rubbish. (In a major score for chorelessness, however, you can fold those seats flat without having to remove the headrests first.) But maybe it is time to rediscover the relief of optionlessness. How often do you bother to reconfigure your back seats anyway?
The Golf has also had to endure the rise of the sports utility vehicle and its armour-plated derivatives, currently holding sway with people who have been sold the bogus idea that these cars are "safer", when in fact they are harder to drive, slower to stop and more likely to flip over if hit from the side. It may prove smarter to be behind the wheel of a nippy, whippy hatch and thus have a greater chance of not getting into accidents in the first place. Thirty years on, the question remains about the Golf: where are the handicaps?
The lowdown
VW Golf GT TDI
Price: £18,530
Top speed: 126mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 9.3 seconds
Consumption: 49.6mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Anybody
On the stereo: Anything
En route for: Anywhere
