I don’t have a good explanation why, but for some reason I seem to have very defined opinions when it comes to Volkswagen Rabbit headlight design choices. I’m specifying Rabbit instead of Golf because Rabbit was what the car was known as in America, and the styling choices I’ll be referencing here relate specifically to the U.S.-market Rabbits built at VW’s Westmoreland, Pennsylvania factory. This is a minor change, limited almost entirely to lighting, and it’s bothered me since I was a kid.
I realized I’ve written about VW Golf lighting design before, noting how a minor design change in headlamp placement from a prototype Golf (then called the Blizzard) made a dramatic difference in the overall look of the car:
I think the production one, with its wide-set round headlamps, looks vastly better than the earlier one with its closer-set lights. I’m not sure what it is about Giugiaro’s Golf/Rabbit design, but for whatever reason, changes in lighting really affect the overall tone and look of the car.
The design change that happened in 1979 with the U.S.-built Rabbits is really minor, and you can see it here:
Volkswagen felt it was enough of a big deal to get its own callout on that chart: “Handsome rectangular headlamps.” Of course, they also call out “good-looking black grille” and “black door handles with gleaming metallic inlay” so the bar isn’t really all that high when it comes to what VW’s brochure team would draw a line to and talk about.
VW also updated the side marker lamps from the original frameless horizontal ones (that were also used on the Mercedes-Benz G-wagen) to the smaller vertically-oriented ones seen here. The call-out copywriter I guess didn’t think that was a deal as a “good-looking black grille.”
I get that rectangular headlamps were still relatively new and exciting in America at the time. I can see that, objectively, you would think the crisp, highly rectilinear design of the Rabbit should have worked better with rectangular headlamps.
Hell, original prototype designs of the Golf included some rectangular headlight options, and they worked pretty well:
There’s a lot of detail differences on that front end from the final production version, but I think this should rectangular lamps could have worked, in some design context.
Intellectually, I understand the design rationale for the rectangular lamps. But I hate them, at least on the basic production Rabbit design.
What is it about the original, round-light design that works so much better, at least for me? Those lights are the only round thing on the car — well, except for the wheels I guess — and they should maybe feel out of place, but they don’t.
I like how they playfully break the lines of the grille, which continues at the sides of the headlights, as though the lights were just somehow plopped atop the unbroken rectangular grille. It’s a subtle detail, but one I always liked.
The face of this Rabbit feels eager and confident. The rectangular-light Rabbit’s face feels stern and disapproving. It feels like it’s squinting, narrowing its eyes as it scans you for something to be pissed about.
I guess the good news for me is the rectangular-light/bumper indicators Rabbit didn’t last long; In 1981, VW updated the look to incorporate the Late Cold War-Era Default Car Face, with its wrap-around corner turn indicators, which I think improved the car’s look significantly.
Perhaps some of VW agreed with me, too, because the ’79 to ’80 rectangular lamp design was a U.S.-only thing, and when the whole car was finally re-designed for the Mark 2 Golf, the slightly-rounded take on the classic ItalDesign shape included big, round lights on the face.
Sometimes even I am amazed by the triviality of the shit I somehow care about, but I’ve been nursing this grudge since 1980, when my parents were shopping around for a car to replace our old ’68 Beetle.
I remember going to the VW dealership, expecting the wide-round eyes of Rabbits to be looking back at me, only to be confronted with row after row of somber-looking Rabbit faces.
That shit sticks with you, man.