Final Parking Space: 1985 Volkswagen GTI

Volkswagen was a bit late in bringing the factory-hot-rod Golf GTI to the United States, with the iconic 1980s hot hatch first showing up here as a 1983 model. When the MkII Golf hit North American VW showrooms as a 1985 model (shedding the old Rabbit name in the process), a GTI version was included. Here’s one of those early MkII GTIs, found in a Denver-area self-service boneyard last week.

U.S.-market GTIs didn’t get Golf badging at first, so GTI was the de facto model name here until later in the decade.

All U.S.-market MkII GTIs were built at Volkswagen’s plant in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, until the facility was shut down in the summer of 1988. After that, they came off the line at Volkswagen de México‘s old factory in Puebla.

The MkII Golf was sold in North America through the 1993 model year, but this is just the second MkII GTI I’ve documented in its final parking space (the previous example was another ’85, found in Northern California back in 2017). These cars are junkyard rarities, in part because not many were sold but mostly because they still have a devoted enthusiast following.

This one is in rough shape, with plenty of body filler and even more rust. A thick coat of industrial-looking white paint didn’t solve the rust problems.

Some missing glass had been replaced by taped-on plastic.

The interior fabrics took serious punishment from the Colorado sun.

A new timing belt went in at 149,594 miles.

That was just 20 miles before it stopped driving. Then the car must have sat outdoors for years or maybe decades before taking that final, sad tow-truck ride.

This car has a SOHC 1.8-liter straight-four engine rated at 100 horsepower and 105 pound-feet. The 16-valve engine wasn’t introduced in U.S.-market GTIs until the 1987 model year.

If you wanted an automatic transmission in your 1985 GTI, you were out of luck. A five-speed manual was mandatory.

The base MSRP for this car was $8990, or about $26,884 in late-2024 dollars. That’s quite a bit less than the cost of the current Golf GTI, but then you get 241 horsepower plus a bunch of unheard-of-in-1985 comfort, safety, and convenience features in the latest version (plus about a half-ton of additional curb weight).

This one came with factory air conditioning, which added $695 to the cost ($2078 after inflation).

Will this car be rescued and put back on the road? Nein!

Everyone must have something in life he can rely on.

VWoA better have paid Chuck Berry well for this mangling of his song. Still, it could have been worse, as we saw with the perplexing “Fast” GTI commercials of a couple of decades later.

Still, it must have been hard to follow up the “Kleine GTI” Mk1 commercial of the year before.

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