I’m Still Angry About This Detail Of The VW Cabriolet/Rabbit Convertible After All These Years

I’ve only owned one convertible out of all of the cars I’ve had. Is that right? Have I only had one convertible? I think so: a 1982 Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. A white-on-white Wolfsburg Edition one, a five-speed with a 90 horsepower engine and what may be the nicest convertible top I’ve seen on a production car, even ones many times more expensive. That top was dense and thick and had a real glass rear window and never even came close to leaking. Of course, being in Los Angeles, we hardly ever put it up at all. It was a genuinely fun and enjoyable car, and remains the most reliable liquid-cooled VW I’ve had. And yet there’s one design decision made on that car that still bothers me to this day.

That decision? It has to do with how the rear side windows rolled down. Or, maybe more accurately, didn’t roll down. At least not all the way. Allow me to kvetch, if you don’t mind, but first, let’s talk about the car more generally.

The Rabbit convertible – later known just as the Cabriolet – came in to fill the convertible hole left when VW stopped making the Beetle convertible in 1979, though in America at least, you could still buy some into 1980, now in Super Beetle form (well, they had been since 1971).

Karmann had been building convertibles for Volkswagen since 1950, and when VW wanted to update their drop-top offering to their newer Golf platform, they went back to Karmann to do the job, in 1979. Really, production started in 1978, but they only made 95 that year, but by ’79 they were being made in quantity.

And, for the most part, Karmann did a fantastic job converting the Golf/Rabbit to a convertible, which was arguably a more difficult job than the Beetle, since the Golf was an actual unibody car, without a separate chassis like the Beetle. The Karmann-made Rabbit/Golf convertibles weren’t just a hatchback car with the top chopped off – this was a unique body based on the original Mark I Golf/Rabbit stampings but unique, and incorporated such radical-for-the-time design choices like that prominent roll bar to give the car rigidity without a top and to keep you from getting accordion’d in case you should roll one over. 

The car was rigid and solid, and kept the Rabbit’s distinctive hatchback silhouette with the top up. Trunk access wasn’t as good as the hatch, of course, but it wasn’t bad, and was definitely usable. The car was great in so many ways. Except one: the rear quarter windows, which only went down about halfway:

What the hell was this? It’s a convertible – the whole damn roof collapses away, leaving the car entirely open, like a big basket with a handle – but, somehow, the rear side windows still stay up like five inches or so? What the hell is going on here?

Why would VW be okay with this? It’s ridiculous. And this was new, too. The old Beetle convertible rear quarter windows rolled down just fine, even in a pleasing angled way, pivoting backwards from a fulcrum on their lower front corner and disappeared completely into the bodywork:

So why the hell couldn’t the vastly newer, much more advanced Rabbit/Golf pull off the same trick?

Back in the day, before the internet let us find out the truth (or at least the popular conspiracy theories) about anything at a moment’s notice, we just heard rumors, and the talk at the time was that there was a government safety regulation that rear quarter windows couldn’t roll down all the way.

This, of course, was bullshit, but it seemed plausible, because so many 1980s cars had compromised rear door windows. Hell, there were vast numbers of GM cars that didn’t let you roll down the rear door windows at all! 

And, somehow the absurdity of this safety regulation still holding true in a convertible, where it really made no sense, just made it seem all the more probable. The entire roof is open but somehow you won’t jump out of the car because of 5″ of window glass in one tiny area? Checks out.

Of course, there was no such regulation. Could this be just another case of a carmaker not wanting to do the hard engineering work to make a window retract into an area that could be compromised by wheel arches or something like that? Maybe! Let’s look:

Okay, this was the best cutaway I could find of a Rabbit convertible, and it does show the window size and shape, the location of rear strut towers and wheelarches and whatever. So let’s see if there would have been room for that window to descend further:

Let’s zoom in here and see what we can do. I’ve shown how far the factory window descends, but also pushed a bit further to see how much more it could have gone without hitting anything – I think a good bit further! Sure, that rear corner is right on the edge of the wheelarch there, but a very slight re-sizing of that window could have solved that!

I’m not convinced that Karmann had no choice here. I think if the window was slightly smaller in width, it could have descended far enough so that just an inch or so was exposed, which would have been vastly better than what we actually got, which was, charitably, stupid.

I looked for other cutaways of the Cabriolet to see if there were any other reasons why that window couldn’t have dropped into the body more, and while this one shows the rear suspension a bit clearer, it also notably omits the windows entirely. It still looks like there would have been room in there!

Again, the old Beetle convertible was able to get them down, by angling the window. The New Beetle convertibles took a slightly different tactic, but still did a little angled jog:

I don’t think the Rabbit/Cabrio needed to do exactly that but I do think Karmann could have tried a little harder, there.

I’m just still amazed this was an acceptable solution. with everything open, those two not-so-little sails of glass absolutely got in the way. Half the fun of a convertible is jumping in the back, over the bodywork – those dumb windows prevented that!

When we had ours in LA, our three dogs loved that car, because of all of the vast sniffabilities afforded by the open top. But those dumb half-windows were always in the way, getting covered with dog noseprints and drool, and I can tell you from experience they did not keep dogs from jumping out of the car to chase a squirrel or something.

I think I’m so irritated by these windows still because otherwise, the Rabbit convertible/Cabriolet was really a fantastic little car. Four-seat convertibles just aren’t all that common, especially not affordably, but the Rabbit convertible was. It was fun to drive, good on gas, surprisingly reliable, roomy, relatively practical – a great package, just let down by one stupid design choice.

Honestly, I can think of worse uses for a time machine than going to Osnabrück in 1978 and bribing, guilting, or berating some Karmann body engineer to spend just a bit more time on those windows and get the damn things to go all the way down. So, any time machine owners who are sick of killing Baby Hitler or having lunch with Socrates or Jesus or a dinosaur, you know how to find me.

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