As Tom Waits once said, 'alternative to what?!' The Rabbit GTI was the un-Camaro to Generation X, and became an icon for decades to come.
Try to find a Gen Xer who doesn’t have a memorable experience in a Volkswagen GTI somewhere in their past. My own involves high-school friend Brian Schmidt firing his dad’s Rabbit GTI into a curving highway off-ramp at an imprudent speed. Utterly powerless from the passenger’s seat, I could feel the black Rabbit pushing toward the ditch at the edge of the ramp, its inside rear tire lifted. Rollover seemed inevitable.
And then, a decade or so later, with the sport-compact-car world flourishing, the GTI was the non-Honda. The outlier. At least this was true in the U.S. In Europe, the GTI was less the alternative than it was the hot-hatch blueprint for every other carmaker. Because VW was slow to claim rights to the name, manufacturers as diverse as Peugeot and Suzuki slapped “GTI” badges on their own hot hatches.
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