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For a brief amount of time, I drove a Mk3 Volkswagen GTI. While it didn’t have the VR6, I still have fond memories of that car. It wasn’t the sportiest of hot hatches, nor the fastest, but it did everything well and I had nary a problem with it. Midway through the Mk3 production run, Volkswagen went a bit wild with the paint shop and released the Golf Harlequin. This was part of a design series for VW and an attempt to draw more traffic in the showrooms. There were four versions of the Harlequin, each with a different “base” color. This Harlequin for sale in Washington state has a Ginster Yellow base color and seems to have escaped the ravages of rust that plagued many Mk3 Golfs. It is also refreshing to see one that hasn’t been modified and the mileage is reasonable considering its age.
For the several years I lived in San Francisco, the A3 was a ubiquitous but understandable yuppie choice. Good luxury, decent utility and speed with a good measure of the all-important parkability make it a great choice for cityfolk. My college girlfriend had an A4 2.0T that I very much enjoyed wringing out, even if it wheezed a little at the top end. The quick and available tuning options would be very tempting for me, and a dark-grey dart on RS4 wheels sounds like a killer commuter. A well-explained fender-bender knocks this one’s history but helps bring the price down to a level where, with just over 50k miles, it should move very quickly.
It’s not too often that you get excited about an entry-level, no frills car. Take, for example, today’s 4-door 1995 Golf. It’s not the first year of the A3, nor the last. It’s Colorado Red, probably not the color I’d have chosen. It’s got broad, flat and not particularly supportive tan cloth seats. The interior is a sea of plastic, and unlike recent Audi and Volkswagen products, it’s not the pretty and soft kind. It’s not got the fantastic VR6 motor, not even a manual transmission, and to top it off, yes, those are wheel covers. So why is it here, and why did I get excited when I saw it? Well, what makes every unmodified Golf special? In the case of this car, just the fact that it exists at all makes me excited; a low mileage survivor Mk.3 that is completely original? Yes, please!
Purists decried the arrival of the “grown up” A3 chassis Golf and Vento, sold as the Jetta in North America. It was expensive, it was heavy (relative to the A1 and A2 chassis, anyway) and the performance was dulled – that was, until the introduction of the GLX model that replaced the earlier GLi models. Now sporting the VR6 that had debuted in the Corrado a few years earlier, the GLX was all around a screamer. It might have been heavier than the GLi had been, but it was quicker to 60, quieter on the highway, more comfortable and better in crashes (if things went south), and returned close to the same fuel economy as the thirsty, buzzy and boxy 16V had. The Jetta in many ways helped to save Volkswagen, too – being one of the highest sellers since the Beetle, it was insanely popular and seemed to be the defacto college car of choice for both men and women. Because of that, many of these Jettas fell into disrepair or were totaled, so it’s rare to find a lower mile and clean GLX these days:
I have several times bemoaned the fact that, until recently, Volkswagen opted to not bring the 4-door Golf R32 to the United States. However, what they did offer for fans of utility was the Audi A3 3.2 quattro. It was a very expensive luxury counterpoint to the Golf R32 that we often feature, and with effectively the same running gear performance was nearly identical. They’re fairly rare to come by, even in comparison to the pretty rare Golf R32 – most likely due to the hefty premium that Audi charged which put the 3.2 A3 squarely in line with even more commodious options like the A4 2.0T quattro Avant. Once in a while they do pop up for sale though, as a stealthy silver one has today – just in time for the inclement weather in New England:
