The sober body of the five-door Volkswagen Golf combined with 4×4 technology from an Austrian specialist: the Golf Country was a crossover long before the word was invented. Only 7,735 copies found their way to a buyer.
Among the car models with a particularly short construction time, a version of a sales success such as the second Volkswagen Golf occupies a high position: the Golf Country. The compact off-roader had been in production for less than two years, from May 1990 to December 1991. After having built eleven million units of its successful compact mid-sized car, Volkswagen decided to take a new path, literally off the beaten track to be precise. to be. To get straight to the point: that didn’t end well.
But let’s start at the beginning! The high-on-the-legs Golf was first shown to the world at the 1989 Geneva Motor Show, then still as a study model under the name Montana. That designation quickly disappears from the scene, because apparently no one at Volkswagen had thought that Steyr-Daimler-Puch was already selling its version of Mercedes’ G model under that name in Switzerland. As a result, the off-road Golf listens to the Country name when it debuted as a production model at the IAA in September of the same year. And it is immediately one of the eye-catchers of the show, next to the Opel Calibra and the BMW 850i. The Golf II is still a blockbuster, while it has been on the market for seven years and its successor Golf III is already warming up. The Wolfsburg manufacturer bravely leaves the beaten track once and – note the following pun – explores new territory to boost the model’s sales figures.
For all individualists
The Golf Country is really a different story. It is no less than 18 centimeters higher on its wheels, while the price is also seriously rising: it costs at 53,770 guilders (€ 24,400) in the Netherlands more than twice as much as a Golf CL with the basic engine. The transformation into a semi-off-road vehicle takes place about 900 kilometers from the VW factory in Wolfsburg, to be precise at the 4×4 specialist Steyr-Daimler-Puch in Graz, Austria. The Golf is delivered there as a five-door Golf CL syncro, so the version that already has four-wheel drive. The Austrians provide it with an extra frame, reinforced springs and dampers and a modified appearance including a bullbar and an underride protection. A spare wheel is also mounted on the outside, and the off-road Golf is ready. At least that was the idea. In practice, this function worked much less well than the assembled technicians had estimated. One of the stumbling blocks the Golf Country encountered was the Suzuki Vitara. That was a real off-road vehicle, which the Golf could not compete in any way. “The limits of the Golf have been reached much faster in the field,” wrote our colleagues at AutoBild at the time. This was partly because he was casually on rather wide summer tires. In the newspaper Die Welt, the Golf Country is called somewhat more politically correct “an interesting all-terrain limousine”.
Volkswagen itself calls the Country in slick advertisements (including campfire) the ‘Golf for all individualists’. And one thing we have to say to the ladies and gentlemen of the marketing department: As a result of the low sales numbers, you are indeed an individualist when you buy a Country. VW is in any case trying to save the day on the home market by launching a cheaper variant on the market, the Country ‘Allround’. It is a bit less pricey, but you can see that: ‘Waldgrün’ is the only available body color, it stands on steel wheels and you sit on cheap artificial leather. This makes it the ideal car for foresters and hunters on paper, but this time too no success. At the beginning of 1991, the VW employees tried it with a more luxurious instead of a more soberly dressed variant; a chrome bullbar, ditto wheels, beige leather upholstery and a folding roof should convince buyers. But because it is much more expensive than the standard version, only 558 of this version are sold.
Movie hero
The Country even becomes a movie hero. In the winter spectacle ‘Fire, Ice and Dynamite’ with Roger Moore, Uwe Ochsenknecht and Siegfried Rauch, a Golf Country tuned by Kamei drives across the silver screen. This variant is officially called Sahara. But whatever they conjure up from the top hat in Wolfsburg, the intended sales of ‘initially 5,000 cars a year’ are far from being realized. The daring foray into the terrain turns out to be a miscalculation and ends in December 1991, when the counter stops at exactly 7,735 copies.
Today the Country has a small fan base. A must for all fans is the site vw-country.de of model adept Alexander Kramp. And on Instagram you can even see photos of a Lego model of the off-road Golf. Today, you pay a maximum of approximately € 20,000 for a recently used copy. But logically you have to look for them with a lantern, also abroad. We can now conclude that the Golf is still by far the best-selling car in Germany, while the SUV version, the Tiguan, is right behind him there. Apparently that is the recipe that appeals to more people than a Golf on high legs.