1975 Volkswagen Rabbit Test: The Follow-Up to the Beetle Was a Whole Different Car

From the April 1975 issue of Car and Driver.

If you’re still interested in VW’s insect collection, you’ll find it off in some dark corner of the showroom. (Dealers have 1975 versions of the Beetle with fuel injection for both the stripped price-leader and the French-subtitle edition, La Grande Bug—alias Super Beetle.) Center stage has been commandeered by the marque’s latest species, the Rabbit. And take our word for it: For VW, this new machine is an evolutionary revolution. While the Beetle was basically a bad design cajoled into civility, the Rabbit bursts upon us optim­ized from inception, with almost all its rough edges filed off.

It’s an example of the old clean-sheet-of-paper approach, for the Rabbit is practically the opposite of its aged forerun­ner. Instead of an aft-mounted, air-cooled engine driving the rear wheels, the Rabbit has a water-cooled, front engine powering the front wheels. The Rabbit and Scirocco share the 1471-cc engine with the Dasher, but it is mounted transversely instead of longitudinally in the former two.

Efficiency in packaging is the payoff. Except for the Honda Civic, the Rabbit is the shortest sedan money will buy in the U.S. and a hefty eight inches shorter than that old small-car yardstick, the Beetle. Yet its interior is more expansive and a whole lot more usable. The biggest gains over the Beetle are in front legroom (plus two inches), rear kneeroom (plus four inches) and, most important, six inches of extra breathing space between the front doors. The Beetle’s narrow front seats give it that intimate feeling; take a deep breath and you touch elbows with your passenger. But now there is an inex­pensive VW with what amounts to a “precision-size” interior. In fact, the Rabbit is just as spacious inside as the Mercury Monarch in every dimension but one—width, where the Mon­arch has a five-inch advantage. (But remember, the Monarch is rated for five while the Rabbit is a four-seater.)

Long before da Vinci’s time, the box was proven to be the optimum container shape. Centuries later, the Rabbit con­curs. Its sides are straight and its windows flat. The roof towers upward until every passenger is accommodated on some of the tallest seats available in any car. Luggage goes in an aft extension of the main module, while the propulsion/steer­ing unit gets an up-front box all its own.

The single-overhead-cam four isn’t particularly innovative, with a belt-driven camshaft and non-crossflow head, but it is an eager beaver in a day of spineless emissions-controlled engines. The engine is a small 1471 cc (89.9 cubic inches) on the inside but a healthy 70 net horsepower on the outside. And with only 1970 pounds to lug around, 70 horsepower does quite nicely. Our test car was lumbered down with an automatic transmission and a tight torque convertor, which made it feel arthritic off the mark. But even so, the Rabbit trimmed 0.2 seconds from the quarter-mile time of the last Beetle we tested (a 1973 four-speed Sport Bug) while adding a healthy 5.7 mph to the trap speed. With a four-speed Rabbit, you should expect ac­celeration approaching the Scirocco’s 18.1-second and 75.4-mph quarter-mile time—which is quicker than the Honda Civ­ic, Toyota Corolla, Datsun B-210, or V-6 Mustang II.

And all the while, the new VW delivers phenomenal fuel economy. Here again the C/D test car’s automatic revealed the sizable penalties of shift-free driving. We measured 20 mpg on the C/D Driving Cycle for the test Rabbit, while the EPA certification tests showed 24 mpg urban and 38 mpg highway economy for the four-speed version. That EPA rank­ing was second only to the Honda Civic and Datsun B-210, so it’s important to realize that the automatic costs more than its up-front price of $250.

At least you get a good three-speed transmission for the money. Under part throttle, you pass from gear to gear with barely perceptible upshifts. But there isn’t much tightening up for hard runs, so upshifts seem excessively soft and slippery. Another worthy refinement to the automatic would be the ad­dition of a part-throttle downshift.

These are offered as icing-on-the-cake concerns rather than major gripes, because in general the Rabbit is a harmo­nious piece of machinery. Front-wheel drive usually means a handling vice-and-virtue trade-off, but not in the Rabbit. You get the good high-speed tracking that front-wheel drive usual­ly delivers, but you don’t have to put up with heavy torque­-steer, wheel fight, or crippling understeer in exchange. The steering remains sensitive—more to the wheel than the throt­tle—up to the limit of adhesion and it is primarily body roll that keeps you from pushing faster in the turns. Most of the car’s roll stiffness comes from what VW calls a stabilizer rear axle, which is actually one trailing link per wheel welded to a connecting T-section member. As the car heels over, body roll must twist against this member with its designed-in stiff­ness. There is no complementary anti-sway bar for the front, however, so when pushed the Rabbit corners like a boxer at a fire hydrant—with one rear wheel in the air. Because the rear brakes are prone to early lock-up even in a straight line, this also upsets the car’s braking/cornering manners.

These foibles make the Rabbit only little less than a ball to drive. In fact, whole populations of drivers will live for years with this car, strongly impressed by its generally nimble disposition and its sensitive feel of the road through the steering wheel and brake pedal. It slips through city traffic like a bicy­cle and thrives on the parking-space remnants most cars pass by. You can stuff enough groceries for a football team through the rear hatch while the back seat folds and pivots forward out of the way. The only thing you’ll need a trailer for is objects too heavy to boost across the high lift-over.

Convenience is not without its price, but that discussion should be prefaced by a listing of current Beetle tariffs: The stripped Bug will cost you $2895 these days, while the high­line La Grande Bug goes for an inflated $3395. Sandwiched neatly in between is the Rabbit, starting at an attractive $2999. But VW doesn’t want you to buy it like that. Base-car profit is paper thin, so just like Detroit, Volkswagen now has upgrades by the yard. You’ll of course need the $296 Per­formance Package to trade in the undesirable drum brakes for a front-disc setup, and it also includes steel-belted tires like the tight-gripping Semperits on the test car. Inside, you get vinyl seats instead of hair-shirt fabric upholstery and attractive carpeting to cover painted metal sidewalls in both the passen­ger compartment and trunk.

Only after you’ve made that first $296 installment are you eligible for the next hit: $204 for the Deluxe Interior/Comfort Group. This adds a second level of heat and sound insulation over the first step you get with the $296 package. (Even with this double coverage, though, the Rabbit is noisy, with sub­stantial intake air boom whenever the engine is full-throttled.) The latter group also includes a few true desirables, such as full carpeting, a power booster for the brakes and adjustable seat backrests. Strangely enough, there are several items hidden among the options that one used to expect as stan­dard equipment: electric windshield washers, a two-stage blower in the heating/ventilating system (that didn’t generate noticeable ventilation air) and chrome bumpers. So the base Rabbit is a real stripper, meaning you have a $3499 car be­fore you get what used to be considered essential.

One other option worth noting is the $30 passive restraint system. This replaces conventional lap/shoulder belts with but one diagonal belt with its outer end connected to the up­per rear corner of the door frame. As you open up the car, this webbing swings out of the way and you just slide in under­neath it with no buckling required. In place of a lap belt, there is a padded knee restraint that juts out a few inches from the instrument panel to prevent submarining on frontal impacts. VW tests with experimental safety vehicle prototypes show that the idea is indeed viable. The diagonal belt alone is suffi­cient for side impacts as well as roll-overs, and the thickly padded knee restraint is better at preventing certain injuries than a lap belt. The system should make seat belts a lot more palatable, and VW hopes to satisfy pending passive restraint (air bag) laws with this kind of approach.

While that is a near-future threat, the immediate concern for VW is selling cars. And with the Rabbit, that means generat­ing its own new reputation. It is obviously no Beetle—even the running boards are gone—so that cancels a fervent fan club. You can’t peel off its body and dress it up like a GT40, and it would make a terrible dune buggy, so the Rabbit is going to have to make it strictly on its virtues as a car. The sub-$3000 base sticker will help, but it’s hard to sell the public on just plain good transportation when for years they’ve thrived on a four-wheel institution.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com