The concept of the diesel commuter car is almost alien to the American automotive market these days. Diesel is a fuel for trucks, while little cars get around with tiny gas engines and electric motors. It’s all the more strange given Americans had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor when Volkswagen invented this very concept five long decades ago.
The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous time for the US. As superpowers bickered and bit players fought for scraps of trade and power, one energy crisis raged after another. Gas prices spiked, inflation raged, and households looked to tighten their belts as cars were thrust into the center of the political arena. Fuel had been cheap enough that consumers could simply select the biggest engine they could afford, but now running costs were front of mind for the average American on the street.
Amidst this challenging backdrop, diesel gleamed on the horizon. The humble, greasy fuel held promise of greater efficiency and lower costs, tantalizing every automaker to flirt with bringing it into the mainstream. While International put it in off-roaders and Chevy put it in land yachts, Volkswagen had a better idea. The German automaker was about to invent the compact diesel commuter car.
Gettin’ Gassy With It
These days, diesel cars are widely popular around the world. While there are few on American roads, they’re a big deal in places like Europe, even in the smallest city cars. Every automaker from Peugeot to Porsche will sell you a diesel, with displacements from 1.1 liters and up. However, it wasn’t always thus. Go back 50 years, and diesel cars were obscure everywhere.
In the early 1970s, diesel was almost solely seen as a fuel for trucking and other heavy-duty applications, like tractors or other farm machinery. While a handful of automakers had built some diesel-powered cars for on-road use, they remained an obscure curiosity more than anything else. Gasoline was cheap and made for easy-to-run, high-revving engines. There was little reason to bother with an alternative fuel that generally offered less power, poor cold-starting performance, and was seldom readily available at gas stations for the general public.
The oil crisis of 1973 would come to change all that. A number of major oil producers had banded together under the banner of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. In October of that year, they announced a total oil embargo against several countries, which instantly skyrocketed oil prices worldwide. The price per barrel quadrupled in just six months, and across the world, drivers were left reeling at the pump. The embargo soon ended, but prices failed to return to previous lows. With gas now an expensive commodity, there was suddenly a huge demand for cars that used as little fuel as possible.
World governments saw disaster, but Volkswagen saw opportunity. The market was seemingly primed for a compact car with an ultra-efficient engine that could offer untold gains to fuel economy. The automaker had already successfully launched the Golf as a replacement for the Beetle. Sold as the Rabbit in the US, it was already finding its place in the market. It combined light weight with great practicality, and was quite the fuel sipper in its existing gasoline guise. All it needed was a decent diesel engine to get those mileage numbers to the moon.
You might think Volkswagen would have started with a clean sheet of paper when it came time to design a diesel engine fit for a small economy car. Instead, engineers elected to start with a pre-existing gasoline engine, an inline-four known as the EA827. It had previously found use in various Audi and Volkswagen applications; it featured in the Rabbit in displacements from 1.3 to 1.8 liters.
As Road & Track reported in 1977, converting the gas engine to diesel operation proved quite the wise move from an economy standpoint. Volkswagen was able to reuse the same crankshaft, connecting rods, flywheel, and bearings, providing great economies of scale. The same basic block was used too, albeit machined differently and with a thicker deck to better handle diesel cylinder pressures. The diesel engine got its own aluminum head, which provided a high compression ratio of 23.5:1. It had the same basic external dimensions as the gas engine head to enable the castings to be machined on the same line. Pistons and wrist pins were upgraded for the extra strain of diesel operation, and VW fitted glow plugs for cold weather starting. With the high number of shared parts, the diesel engine option was just $170 more expensive than the gasoline-powered Rabbit—much cheaper than diesel offerings from some rival automakers.
Both gas and diesel engines were assembled on the same production line. The first diesel version of the EA827 had a displacement of 1.5 liters, and put out a humble 48 horsepower and 58 pound-feet of torque. It wasn’t much, but the 1.5-liter EA827 variants were only putting out 70 hp and 81 pound-feet by comparison. It relied on the contemporary technology of mechanical injection with a distributor injection pump, and used swirl pre-combustion chambers in the head to improve fuel mixing and thus efficiency and performance.
The magic of the diesel Rabbit was readily apparent from the outset. “It’s no secret by now that we think very highly of the Rabbit Diesel,” noted Road & Track in its initial review. “This diesel drives like a car!” The model was naturally praised for its fuel economy—52 mpg highway and 37 mpg city as per the EPA, with Road & Track recording 43 mpg on its own fuel test loop. The low power wasn’t such a problem, either, given the 1978 Rabbit had a curb weight of just 1980 pounds. Road & Track recorded a quarter-mile time of 20.4 seconds and a zero-to-60 mph sprint of 15.8 seconds. Not quick, but the Rabbit Diesel certainly not the slowest new car on the roads back in 1977.
Car & Driver was more reluctant to believe when it road tested the car in its June 1977 issue. “Substituting a Diesel motor for such an outstanding 78-horsepower gasoline engine seemed cruel and unusual punishment—like sending a kid sister to work the coal mines,” read the review. And yet, the converted gas engine won them over all the same. “Right here and now we’d like to confess we judged too soon,” read the review. “The Diesel Rabbit works, it is a success and you don’t have to sacrifice your enthusiasm to like it.” The engine was credited for its easy cold starting and great economy, which weirdly came in at 39.5 mpg city and 35.0 mpg highway during the magazine’s testing. “Speed, however, is at the top of the list in the sacrifice column… you lose fifteen mph in top speed, and a quarter-mile takes almost three seconds longer,” noted the reviewer. ” The other negatives pale by comparison… granted, there is more noise, but it’s not intimidating, and the classic Diesel vices of odor and smoke just don’t apply.”
The contemporary reviews also note a rather amusing problem that diesel faced, which draws a sharp parallel to modern EVs. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, most gas stations didn’t have diesel pumps, because they were for commuters, not truckers. Diesel cars just weren’t a thing, so there was little infrastructure to support them. As Road & Track explained:
The “worsts” cannot be summed up so neatly, especially because the worst of the worsts isn’t really the fault of the vehicle itself. Undoubtedly, however, the least appreciated feature is the inconvenience of the fuel supply. Although it has a per-tank range of 400-plus miles, there’s always the specter hovering that suggests that, sooner or later, you’re going to need fuel and there isn’t going to be a station. In the first 24,000 miles none of our drivers actually ran out before reaching the next source but there was hardly a driver who wandered beyond the local, familiar area who didn’t experience the “will I find one?” pangs as the needle descended toward the bottom of the gauge.
Diesel For All
The diesel wasn’t just for the Rabbit, either. The Rabbit pickup would also get the diesel option, too. Soon to follow was the very first Volkswagen Jetta, which hit the US market in 1979 for the 1980 model year. It would also appear in everything from the Santana, Polo, Quantum, and Type 2 depending on markets, and the Audi 80 as well.
The initial engine was winning fans, but Volkswagen wasn’t resting on its laurels. By 1980, it was offering an ever-so-slightly larger version of the EA827 diesel, now with a 1.6-liter capacity. It offered more power and torque, too, with a subtle bump up to 53 hp and 72 pound-feet of torque.
Things would get yet more advanced by 1982, with the introduction of the new turbodiesel models. This addition of forced induction saw power boosted by 25%, hitting 68 horsepower and 98 pound-feet of torque. The single turbocharger mounted to the exhaust manifold also had the benefit of reducing some of the classic diesel exhaust noise to more pleasant levels.
Come 1983, Road & Track had plenty of praise to heap upon Volkswagen’s more powerful effort. In a review of the turbodiesel-powered Quantum, it noted the engine was “spry, quick, [and] smooth,” with one driver noting they “almost forgot it is a diesel.” The luxurious sedan was somewhat heavier than a Rabbit at 2660 pounds, but recorded a much healthier zero-to-60 mph sprint of 12.6 seconds nonetheless. The heftier four-door was able to hit great economy figures, too, achieving 41 mpg city and 50 mpg highway according to contemporary EPA figures. Overall, the reviewers were big fans of the upgrade. “With the extra boost available from its turbocharger, the diesel is an economical, enjoyable power source for the Quantum,” noted reviewer Dave Black.
Volkswagen was winning reviewers over because it was doing diesel right. Unlike some other automakers, its diesel engines weren’t just good on fuel. They were also reliable. As a bonus, in many applications, they didn’t suffer as much from a lack of power. Volkswagen was primarily putting its diesels in lightweight compacts, where drivers weren’t suffering so much for losing 10-20 horsepower compared to their gasoline counterparts. Furthermore, it was dropping diesels into what were, fundamentally, well-built compact cars.
By the mid-1980s, many automakers in the US were calling time on their diesel experiments. Toyota had given up trying to get Americans keen on the idea, and GM had killed the Oldsmobile diesel V8 after its own attempt to convert a gas engine had blown up in its face, and many owner’s faces to boot. That alone gave the diesel name a bad rap with consumers, economy be damned. References to diesel models started to dwindle in brochures, and subsequent low sales saw the options culled from lineups in short order.
And yet, somehow, Volkswagen persisted. As the generations changed, the Rabbit became the Golf and the Jetta shifted to a new design, too. VW of America kept diesel options coming, on and off, skipping a few model years here and there as they catered to what was ultimately limited demand.
The “TDI” name would start to gather steam from the mid-1990s onwards, blossoming into popularity in the 2000s with great efficiency and incredibly satisfying performance. Volkswagen became the king of commuter diesels in the US, only for the whole tower of cards to come cascading down when the Dieselgate scandal broke. After being caught cheating on emissions, the German automaker decided to stop selling diesel models in the US once and for all in 2016.
Diesel commuter cars are a well-established market today, with all manner of automakers competing in the space. However, few took to the technology as early as Volkswagen. Even fewer made as many headlines, too, though that’s perhaps something the German automaker regrets. Regardless, it serves as a great example of an automaker picking up a useful technology and sticking with it, to the point that they establish a new category of car in the process. That’s precisely what Volkswagen did when it invented the compact commuter diesel.
Image credits: Volkswagen
The 1.6 and later 1.7 and 1.9 n/a diesel is a cultural icon in the Balkans and other Eastern European countries. One of the best things VW ever did.
These diesel powered so many of the Mk2 Golfs, Passats, Passat B3s, Transporter T3/T4 early VW-Seats and Skodas etc.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.
There are still many of them chugging along slowly but reliably after all these years.
I learned to drive a standard in a Rabbit Diesel, great car to learn on.
“The humble, greasy fuel held promise of greater efficiency and lower costs,”
You’ve missed one of the most important factors. Because Diesel-powered passenger vehicles were so few, American regulators completely ignored them when writing emissions standards. Gasoline-powered cars were saddled with lots of new and unproven technologies, such as smog pumps, catalytic converters, primitive electronic spark control with significantly retarded timing, etc. etc. Open the hood of a gas car and you see gobs of hoses and sensors and vacuum switches and there’s an engine in there somewhere. Open the hood of a Diesel Rabbit or Mercedes Diesel and all you see is engine.
My grandmother was a pretty amazing woman. She was the first woman to graduate from William and Mary with a chemistry degree. In the 1970s she was writing computer code for satellite communications which was bleeding edge tech at the time. And, her last car was a ’80 diesel Rabbit 4 speed manual in bright yellow. I remember being a kindergartener who had never heard a diesel before, at least in a car, so the clattering of the engine sounded pretty crazy to me. She had that car until after my grandfather died in late 1999, so it lasted her a solid 20 years.
The 1.6 liter (D16) also got a 6-cylinder sibling, the D24. We got it in the US in the Volvo 240 diesels, and the turbocharged version in the 760 diesels. I think they stopped selling them in the US after ’87, but Volvo kept selling them in Europe in the 940s well into the ’90s.
In the early 80s I was a long-haul commuter (65 miles each way) and considered a Diesel Rabbit. A friend who managed a Porsche-Audi dealership convinced me to test-drive a 1984 Audi 4000, and I never looked back.
A diesel Rabbit is the only car I’ve ever been in where the engine seized, on the highway. My friend had bought it for $400 in the early 90s and was so proud of it, always talking about the great fuel economy. He managed to get it pulled on to the median and the starter wouldn’t budge that engine. Cops had it towed off the highway and he rented a tow dolly the next day and fetched it with his truck. Stopped at a junkyard on the way home and they made him PAY $25 to take it.
My first use of VW diesels came in the early 80s in (West) Germany, when I had VW GTD rental cars.
It was quite a while before I owned one though; my wife and I both had 2014 SportWagens, mine was manual and hers had the DSG transmission. We sold them back to VW only because they paid us more than we paid for the cars. I do miss that car though.
The stripes on the accessorised yellow Rabbit had a big impression on 6 year old me – I used to draw R-a-hopping b-b-i-t on every VW I saw in my dad’s Car and Drivers and Motor Trends amongst other ‘customisations’.
There are still several Rabbit Diesel pickups running around my Oregon town, 40 years on.
There are enough people who love them to keep every remaining example running until the end of time. In 50 years people will be 3D printing replacement fuel pumps and running them on algae oil
The Rabbit pickup is still a unique proposition in the US, especially with a diesel. I think I’d like one with a later TDI engine, but from before all the crazy emissions nonsense. A mildly tuned 1.9L TDI sounds perfect.
Eventually the diesel was standard in Rabbits in the US, and the gas engine was the extra-cost option. I don’t believe they ever got the turbodiesel as an option in the US, but the MKII Golf did – very, very rare cars though. VW sold turbodiesel Jettas in the MK1 and MK2 generations, and then the TDI debuted in the MKIII. When I bought my ’84 GLI, I looked at an ’84 TD but it wasn’t in as good condition and they wanted more for it.
It was the combination of direct-injection and diesel that really lit the fire of diesel acceptance in the rest of the world. You got the economy of a tiddly little 1.2L gas motor with the performance of a 2.0L, with effortless low end shove so you didn’t have to beat the piss out of the thing to make progress. In places where fuel was a multiple of the cost in the US, that mattered. Gas was just too cheap for most Americans to care. But VW and Mercedes kept the fire going over here. It pains me that after offering nothing BUT diesels in the w123 wagons, Mercedes only offed the diesel in the w124 wagon for a single year, and then never again, even when they offered them in the sedans. Just baffling, given the Venn diagram of people who like wagons and people who like diesels is pretty near a perfect circle. The most rational of rational car choices.
My first brand-new car was an ’02 Golf GLS TDI – I would have loved the then brand new Jetta wagon TDI, but the budget wouldn’t stretch that far. A fantastic car – smooth, quiet, in the real world quicker most of the time than the 2.sl0 gas engine due to massively more torque at lower rpm, and 50mpg+ vs. 30. But emissions plus the rise of the direct-injected turbocharged gasoline engine has killed the majority of the appeal. But it took longer to get direct-injected gasoline engines working. The VW 1.4 TSI can do everything the TDI can do for less money, upfront and down the road. Hard to justify the diesel when you are stuck with massively expensive emissions gear and a less than 10mpg delta in fuel usage, along with much if not most of the time, more expensive fuel. So even if I could buy another new diesel VW, I would not.
I love my 2014 Sportwagen TDI. I’ve never owned a diesel before, but I am smitten with it. I get 40+ mpg on the highway and by being just a little careful, I can get mid 30s in town provided the engine has time to reach operating temperature. The biggest difference between driving it and my previous manual-equipped VWs is that you can short shift the hell out of it. I can cruise at 45mph in sixth gear at around 1100 RPM. Having it tuned was one of the best things I ever did, up from 145hp to 160 and torque is up from 235 to 310ft/lbs. I get why diesel cars aren’t popular here in the States, but I really enjoy mine.
I had one of these in high school with the 4 speed manual. It was a great car and it got around 40mpg back then which was unheard of. Diesel was around $1/gallon then so it was super cheap to run. Cold starts in the dead of winter were no problem once you let the glow plugs warm up. But it had no horsepower and had real problems maintaining speed on any hills on the highway. The fuel injector pump eventually failed and that mechanically totaled it for me.
My dad had a 1977 Bosch K-Jetronic fuel-injected, German-built Rabbit. Fantastic car.
Then he gave it to me and bought a 1979(?) US-built Rabbit diesel to use for his long commute. Right from the start it didn’t run well, so he pulled out the Service Manual (he always bought one), looked at the engine, looked at the pictures, looked at the engine, and realized that several hoses and parts had not been installed at the factory. Even after fixing, the car would vibrate the fillings out of your teeth. The paint on the hatch was about 5mm thick and crazed. The interior had been “Americanized”, which meant it looked like a 1974 baby-blue Buick. Accelerating onto a highway was scary. What a piece of junk.
They revived and killed all US options for brown manual diesel wagons.
I’m conflicted.
Guess it’s time to swap an OM617 into a Volvo 240 wagon.
“…und ve vould have gotten avay vith it too, if it vazn’t for ze meddling federal investigators!”
European countries have favoured diesel over gasoline for tax purposes, likely to limit the burden of tax on commercial trucking. European cars were already fairly fuel efficient, so diesel was the only way to lower operating costs.
In North America, this was not the case for taxes. Simply downsizing a lot of vehicles provided big gains in average vehicle economy, no big investment in diesel required.
Diesel is an industrial fuel; a heavier fraction of oil. It is used in ships, tractor-trailers, small power stations, and industrial equipment. The last thing you want to do is make your industrial fuel supply also your private transport fuel supply, because a pinch in those prices has much wider knock-on effects economically.
Gasoline – a lighter fraction of oil – burns cleaner and the emissions controls have proven longevity. It doesn’t compete with industrial fuel demand; gasoline is nearly exclusively used for private transportation / small engines.
Diesel is a poor fuel for light-duty private automobile transport. It exists as a product of favoured fuel taxation, or difficulty of obtaining gasoline in certain parts of the world.
I don’t quite understand the enthusiasm for diesel over a gasoline engine, unless in a very heavy duty application.
A friend in high school had a diesel Rabbit. With four high school boys, we couldn’t get that thing up to 65 MPH. So cool, you converted the gas engine, but the result did not meet our use case.
I owned a 1979 Rabbit Diesel that I used to get around for college back in the late 1980’s. I swapped out the stock 4 speed manual with a 5 speed from a newer Rabbit. The worst fuel economy I got was 39 mpg on a trip from southern California to Arizona on I-10 where I literally spent the entire drive with my foot mashed to floor going 80mph in a deseporate attempt to keep up with traffic. Besides the stellar fuel economy and nice handling, the car was a reliablity nightmare. It blew head gaskets a lot, probably due the temperature switch in the cooling system that was supposed to turn on the electric radiator fan but didn’t work very often. I eventually wired in a heavy duty toggle switch to the dash to manually turn on the fan when the temperature gauge started to get into the red. The engine vibrated like an old hotel coin operated massage bed. The vibration caused a lot of accessories like the alternatior to loosen up unless you kept an eye on the tensioner. The parts cost were much more than any domestic car. It was the car that luckily cured me of my fascination with German cars which has saved me a lot of money based on what I observed from all my co-workers that continued to buy BMWs and VWs.
Extremely similar experience with my 1980 rabbit. (Although in the 2010s) Unfortunately, my mom enjoyed the car so much she would only drive VWs for about 10 years even though the modern ones are so much more expensive to maintain and fix. I finally got her into a toyota now after a six-month slog repairing her 2013 Jetta TDIs egr system.
I still have all the tools from doing the timing belt on the ’82 Rabbit Diesel pickup I had for a few months forever ago. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a need to do another, but those things are permanently ensconced in my toolbox.
Odd that VW could use a gasoline engine to create a perfectly reliable diesel – whereas GM could not.
Or perhaps not so much odd as unsurprising?
Perfectly reliable is a bit of a stretch, the 1.5L eat headgaskets for breakfast as the headbolt clamping is barely adequate. The slightest overheating can do them in. For the 1.6L they upgraded from an 11mm headbolt to a 12mm headbolt which helped a lot, but they still have issues. Source my 1980 rabbit 1.5L ate a new headgasket in 10k miles, replaced, another 10k, sold it to a buddy who swapped in a 1.6L and got about 30k before the head gasket went again. Great but slow car other than that.
Unrelated to Diesel but late 70s Rabbits were fantastic. I had a 78 with fuel injection 4sp manual it was fantastic. I could go from 0-75 in just 3rd gear.