The original Volkswagen Golf GTI is something of an icon, a milestone in the Hot Hatch Greater Cinematic Universe, and the car it’s based on, the regular Volkswagen Golf Mk.1, is an icon of automotive design on its own. The designer of the original Volkswagen Golf was Giorgetto Giugiaro, founder of ItalDesign, and I just learned that the only car he was ever given by an automaker he worked for was a Golf, given to him by VW. This was a special Golf for a number of reasons, one of which I find strangely satisfying. I’ll explain.

First a bit of a reminder about the level of achievement the Giugiaro-designed Golf was. By the late 1960s, VW realized they desperately needed a real replacement for the Beetle, which had carried them so far but was still fundamentally a 1938 design with incredible perseverance. It was just getting incredibly dated, and VW’s acquisition of NSU and Auto Union had brought them access to the new, modern mechanical formula of transverse engines and front-wheel drive.

VW needed a car that filled the Beetle’s humble yet important niche, but with modern engineering. Giugiaro was given some incredibly severe and specific parameters in which to work – almost every dimension already decided, inside and out – and within these restrictions, Giugiaro managed to create something so timeless and simple and perfect it was almost hard to believe it hadn’t just always existed in some form.

The crisp, folded-paper look of the car was the diametric opposite to the curvy, biomorphic design that had always defined Volkswagen, and yet, somehow, it still fit and it still worked. The result was a car, about the same size as the original Beetle, but modern and airy and practical, a genuine triumph of good, honest design.

Now, here’s the part I just learned about: in the ’70s, Volkswagen offered to give Giugiaro a car, the only time the designer ever got a car from a carmaker. Giugiaro wanted a daily-driver family car, but he also wanted something fun to drive, so he requested a VW GTI, the sportier version of the Golf with a kicky 110 horsepower engine, about double what a base model Golf put out.

Being a family car, Giugiaro wanted a five-door model, for both convenience and the fact that he preferred the look of the 5-door Golf, with its very defined C-pillar. At the time, VW didn’t build the GTI in five-door form, but they made one special for ol’ GG, which is pretty fantastic.

There was something else that Giugiaro, who lived in Europe, specified he’d like on his special GTI; see if you can spot it:

See it? They’re big and obvious: the US-spec bumpers. They even have the optional rubber bumper guards!

This addition gives me a lot of satisfaction because, in the water-cooled VW world, it always seemed like everybody hated the US-spec bumpers. They were larger than the Euro-style bumpers, sure, as you can see here:

There were also Euro-style sleeker bumpers, sometimes found on GTIs:

Everyone always seemed to prefer these other bumpers, for aesthetic reasons, even if they were, functionally, far less capable than the shock-absorber-mounted US-spec, no-damage-up-to-5mph bumpers. But people never had anything good to say about the US bumpers, and would often retrofit their cars to have the smaller Euro ones.

But I think it’s extremely significant that the person who actually designed the Golf, Giugiaro himself, when it came to the Golf that he wanted to drive around and be seen in, he went out of his way to request that VW build his European-market Golf, with its strange lone side indicator repeater on the front fender and special ItalDesign badges, would have the huge, strong American-spec bumpers.

After going on and on about how we need stronger bumpers, and anticipating the inevitable arguments against that for aesthetic reasons, it feels pretty good to find that one of the greatest car designers of all time was on Team Strong Bumper.

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