Important Thoughts On Rabbit Lighting For Your Morning: Cold Start

I’m going to talk to you about something that has been banging around in my brain for decades, a set of thoughts and opinions I developed way back in 1980, when my family’s old 1968 semi-automatic Beetle caught on fire, forcing us to look for a new car. I remember going with my parents to all the car dealerships, and forming memories I still cherish today, like seeing an AMC Pacer in a showroom, and getting to drive in it. A brand-new Pacer! What you’re feeling is envy, and no reason to panic, by the way.

Anyway, I was very fond of our old Beetle, so I was excited when we went to the Volkswagen dealership to see what they had. I was aware that the Beetle was no longer being sold in America, so that wasn’t an option, which disheartened me, but I was still curious about the new liquid-cooled VWs.

Oh, actually – the Beetle wasn’t entirely gone. In 1980, you could still buy a (technically 1979 model year) Beetle Convertible at a VW dealer, and I remember seeing one and being absolutely thrilled.

It was like that one up there, I think it was even silver, and I remember the absurd UNLEADED FUEL ONLY sticker stuck on the outside of the fuel door flap, for some baffling reason. Still, it looked both modern and yet still like the old Beetles I knew, and I lobbied hard that we should just get one of these, but I couldn’t convince my sadly rational parents that what we really needed for a family car was a rear-engined convertible.

They were there to look at the Rabbits, which is what we called Golfs in America, in case you forgot, and those Rabbits were actually American-made, in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, and differed a bit from Golfs in the rest of the world. There was one main visual difference. I’ll show you.

Here’s what the Golf looked like in the rest of the world and America, up until 1979:

…and here’s the 1979 Rabbit:

As you can see, they changed the headlights, from round to rectangular. They also changed the side marker lamps from those simple, frameless reflectors (also used on Mercedes-Benz G-Wagens) to those fussy little vertical things, divided into thirds.

I’ve actually written about this change before, at the old site, and probably don’t need to write about it again, but I need a Cold Start and I’m thinking about it, and screw it, life is for the living.

Anwyay, even as a kid, I really hated this change. Somehow the changing of the lamp shape completely changed the character of the car, and not in a good way. Were before the Rabbit had a sort of friendly, eager expression, as you can see even in this hoity-toity Champagne Edition II:

…the square lights somehow gave the front end a skeptical, almost judgmental feel:

It looks like it’s inspecting something critically and going hmmmmmmm in an irritated tone. Who wants that? The brochure here refers to them as “handsome rectangular headlamps,” which, okay, it’s a brochure, you gotta say that, even though VW calling out the “good-looking black grille” feels like maybe it’s pushing it, just a bit too much.

What gets me is that on paper, you would think the rectangular lights would be better, as they absolutely fit the overall aesthetics of the car better. Aside from the wheels, which must be round for, I believe, legal reasons, there’s nothing round in this design. So why introduce a jarring roundness in the headlamps?

And yet, somehow I think it works better. I love the way the round lamps break the boundaries of the grille, too. And the position of the lamps is much more carefully thought out than you may guess; the rectangular lamps abut the sides of the grille, neatly. The round lamps are inset just a bit, to allow the corners of the grille to peek out at the edges, playfully.

But they’re not inset too much! As VW showed on one of the early Rabbit prototypes, then known as the Blizzard, things looks very weird when the lights get inset too much:

See? Look how weird the lights look when they’re inset that much! It just feels wrong. But look how right it looks when they’re further apart, but, again, with just that hint of grille around the edges. Somehow, the round lights just work, even on that unashamedly rectilinear body.

When VW updated the American Rabbit in 1984 to have wraparound turn indicators, somehow it improved the look significantly, though I can’t exactly explain why:

This also moved the Rabbit into having the Late Cold War-Era Default Car Face, which I have also discussed before.

You could still get the round lights if you opted for the Rabbit Diesel, since those weren’t made in Westmoreland:

…of course, you’d also be going from an 8.5 0-50mph time to an 11.something 0-50 mph time, but that just meant you’d be slow enough for everyone to enjoy your round headlights. Also, that was the fastest diesel on the market at the time! And you’d get like 50 mpg!

Anyway, thanks for letting me complain about this. Again.