Today on the world’s most niche and amusing (I hope) auto blog we’ll be discussing a very specific and special car. The VW Rabbit is admittedly a fairly standard car, there were around 6 million of them manufactured during its production run, and the Mk 1, which is the topic of this post was actually made until 2009 in South Africa where it was marketed as the “Citi Golf” and offered as a budget friendly offering. The Rabbit I am most familiar with however, is from the year 1982. Disco is still booming, the first CD player is put onto market, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is heard for the first time and some poor sod buys a brown VW Rabbit. 

Now, I think it is unfair to judge an entire model range of cars based on one poor example, so we’ll chalk my best friend’s Rabbit’s poor reliability and performance up to improper maintenance and general abuse. As you can see in the picture at the top of this article, the Rabbit had a history of ejecting its wheels. That was the first time it had ever happened and interestingly enough not the last. We were about 120 miles north of home in Upstate NY on a camping trip and cruising down a country road doing about 55. All of a sudden the steering wheel starts vibrating- thunk thunk thunk– I figure that it’s probably a flat tire and we should pull over as soon as possible. As we took a turn to pull into the Walmart parking lot, the driver’s side front wheel flew off sending the poor Rabbit about 2 feet into the air and skidding to a violent stop while the dashboard illuminated with all kinds of warning lights I had never seen before. 

We all got out of the car and started laughing hysterically. Not because there was anything particularly funny about the situation, but because had it happened 2 minutes prior while we were travelling at highway speeds we would’ve ended up in the newspaper as “4 Teenagers Die in Fiery Car Accident”; it was one of those, “Oh shit we didn’t die.” laughs. As I previously mentioned this wasn’t the first time this car would go on to nearly kill us. The next (and last time) I drove it, me and another buddy were headed up to the Hudson Valley to pick up a friend from college for the Thanksgiving Holidays. Let me set the scene: 2 days before Thanksgiving, everyone is in a rush to get somewhere, all the roads within a 100 miles of NYC are swarming with aggressive motorists and there we are zipping by in a sputtering, tiny car. At one point we found ourselves stuck behind a pickup truck with its flashers on doing 35 on the interstate. I had made the decision to pass him and changed lanes; what I failed to remember was that the Rabbit did not like to get going, like at all. As I floored it to take us around the pickup truck it stalled, which wasn’t fantastic because there was a man behind us going at least twice our speed. It was very unpleasant but thankfully we survived. 

So my general opinion of this particular rabbit is as follows: it doesn’t want to go, it doesn’t want to stop and for some reason it wants to kill whoever drives it. My advice to you is to do your due diligence before buying a rabbit, or maybe avoid 80s Volkswagens altogether.