Golf designer's sense of history

Volkswagen's small car turns an old axiom on its head. Spanish philosopher George Santayana is attributed with the observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the case of the Volkswagen Golf, the car manufacturer does remember the past and is committed to repeating it. The Golf 6 is the latest in a succession of front-wheel drive small cars from Volkswagen dating back to the mid 1970s. In Type 1 guise it was literally the anti-Beetle.

Unlike the rear-engined, rear-wheel drive and air-cooled Beetle, it was front-engined, front-wheel drive and water-cooled. Other companies had introduced cars that were a far cry from the models they replaced, but other than Volkswagen, only Porsche and its 928 ever attempted to replace one distinct model with another so removed in design terms -- and it didn't work for Porsche anyway.

Out here for the launch of the Golf 6, Volkswagen designer Frank Bruese describes the Golf and its antecedents as "one of the last living icons". What he insinuates, but doesn't say directly is that the original Giugiaro-penned Golf 1 was a ground-breaking design in its own way, but subsequent models have been not much more than refinements of that original design.

Anything based on the Golf platform that has diverged from the mould gets a new model name (Vento, Jetta, New Beetle, Audi A3, TT, etc), but the Golf itself remains 'fixed'; retaining the look and feel of the Golf is of paramount importance to Volkswagen.

Bruese sets the Golf apart from many of its logical competitors, which he allocates to one of two categories.

"The two other kinds of designs we can find [in the 'Golf club'] are the trend followers and the copiers," he says.

"The trend followers have matched the packaging and design standards in each generation and the copiers -- because they're new to the market -- they don't have any history. They mix in elements from different cars and different brands.

"What they both have in common is that they don't have a strong identity or heritage.

"As soon as the new car's unveiled, the old one's dead -- and therefore also, the resale value."

An example of a trend follower is the Opel Astra (Holden Astra here). The AH series car introduced here in 2004 carries a lot of Type 5 Golf influence, and artist's impressions of the 2009 model that will supplant it have been denounced by Mazda as a blatant rip-off of the Japanese company's original Mazda3.

A 'copier', according to Bruese's definition might be something like the new Kia Cerato -- a car that not only shares little in the way of styling with the model it replaces, but exhibits styling cues in common with other small cars.

We asked Bruese for his view on the Ford Focus, a car now in its second generation, both radical and ground-breaking on its release in Europe during the late 1990s. Although he doesn't comes straight out and say so, Bruese appears to consider the Focus an example of the way a company can learn from Volkswagen's Golf strategy -- but he is forthright that Ford sacrificed its 'Escort' goodwill when it replaced the older car with the very different Focus.

"A normal customer can't even remember an old Escort... so you see, it's not [the same] heritage, like the Golf. They changed from Escort to Focus, so it means they had a lot of heritage, but they gave it away," he told the Carsales Network.

While the Escort is often remembered with some fondness in Australia, the front-wheel drive models that were never sold here didn't garner the same affection in Europe, so perhaps Ford was right to ditch the Escort nameplate for an altogether new car that would potentially stretch the envelope where market acceptance was concerned.

"You see right now that the Focus is built on the old one, so there's still a connection, [as we have with the Golf]," says Bruese, appearing to support Ford for the way that company has managed the Focus image and its place within the Ford brand.

The question remains though, is Volkswagen on the right track? For the Golf 6, Bruese and his team ironed out the Golf 5's wedge styling to reduce the beltline for kids in the back seat, in order to see out -- a clever device that has also left the new car looking lower and wider than the old one.

So the car's styling progression is there, but some will argue that progress is too slow and the styling of the new model is not a major advance over that of its predecessors. Arguably too, no Golf since the first generation has been styled in a way to make you sit up and take notice. Bruese counters such arguments with his view that people place their trust in something they know -- and therein lies the Golf's strengths.

But have we really all become so anxious about our place in the world that a car's styling must remain immutable for all time -- and when did resale come to have such a bearing on a car's style?