If you’ve been reading my ramblings about cars for a while, you know there are a number of concepts that I keep returning to when it comes to what I value in a car. Many of those things are ridiculous, I know that. But I think some actually make sense, a humble sort of rational sense that belies my usual nature, which is that of an idiot. But I do firmly believe that there are certain traits that mainstream, everyday cars should have that benefit everybody: traits like affordability, utility, and maybe the biggest one, forgiveness. Volkswagen had a concept car way back in 1982 that I think embodied these simple but elusive traits, and it’s all but forgotten today.
The car was called, tellingly, the Student. It was only VW’s second attempt to make a city car that slotted in below the Golf; well, I guess second time after the Great Liquid-Cooled FWD Switchover, or the Autounification of Volkswagen. The first (successful) try was the VW Polo in the 1970s, though long before that, back in the air-cooled era, VW also toyed with the idea of a small city car to slot in below the Beetle, if you can imagine that. We’ve written about that car– the EA48 – before, and like the Student, that car never went beyond the prototype stage.
The Student was a genuinely interesting and clever attempt to make a truly entry-level car, and while I think it has some influence on later Volkswagens, I’m not sure we have anything that really accomplishes what this could have on the market today.
I mention VW’s interest in entry-level city cars just to note that VW understands the Golf isn’t the lowest rung on the ladder, and there’s still a good market below it, which VW has filled with cars like the aforementioned Polo, the Lupo, and the Up!. In fact, the old Student concept reminds me a bit of the Up!, especially from the rear.
I haven’t heard much mentioned of if the Student concept was a direct influence on any of the Up!’s styling, but I think you can definitely see it, especially from the rear:
A lot of it is just clever small, inexpensive car design, like having a window act as a hatch. You need to have the rear window anyway, so why not just let that be the hatch itself? Save the hassle of designing a hatch to enclose the window and save the stamping costs and metal and whatever. The sizes and proportions are quite close, too (as they are with the VW Lupo of 1998 as well), but I think. that’s just convergent evolution at work, since both cars have the same fundamental goals.
I think there was one other place where the Student’s design influenced later Volkswagens, and this one we can’t attribute to converging designs for similar goals, because this time the influence was on a car in the upper part of VW’s lineup: the Passat.
The B3 Passat’s dramatically smooth, grille-free front fascia looks a hell of a lot like the face of the Student, down to the shape of the light units and everything. I think it’s pretty likely that the Student was a direct influence on this era of Passat because the same person, Herbert Schäfer, designed both cars. It’s a nice looking, clean design!
There is, however, one big difference in how that design is realized in the Student compared to the Passat, though, and that difference directly ties into one of those big concepts I was talking about: forgiveness. The Student’s face and fenders are all made of plastic, plastic that (I believe) has its color pigmented into it, not painted. This front mask – and its matching equivalent at the rear – is designed to be forgiving of bumps and scrapes and all of the effects of occasionally sloppy driving, on your part or some other idiot’s. I love when a car accepts our fallibility, and is designed to deal well with whatever fate hands it, unlike so many modern cars that have fragile painted bumpers with skins that cost thousands of dollars to replace, studded with cameras and ultrasonic sensors and wildly expensive lighting units that turn a small bump into a five-figure repair bill. Who needs that?
Schäfer must have agreed with me on some level, because look at the big black plastic bumpers on that Passat, and how they wrap all the way around the car! That’s what I’m talking about.
The Student seems like it could have taken a pretty good beating at both ends there.
The other quality that the Student had that feels missing today is a pretty basic one: it was designed to be cheap. In America especially, it’s very hard to find a genuinely affordable new car, because carmakers don’t seem interested in serving that lower-return part of the market. And that drives me clamshit. The student used the Polo’s 1.1-liter inline-four making about 50 hp, which is plenty for this kind of car.
It also has those great minimalistic door handles that I love! Just a cut-out from the door skin! So good.
This was designed to be a car a student could afford, as the name suggests, and like the original Beetle that started the company, this concept doesn’t feel like it’s trying to punish you for the crime of being un-rich. It has some charm and character, even while being a bargain.
The interior layout is simple and clever, too. There’s plenty of recognizable early-80s VW parts-bin stuff, but the layout is novel, with that tall, narrow, vertically-oriented center stack area. Could you have put a radio in there? Maybe you’d have to sacrifice that passenger-side shelf area. Feels like a reasonable trade-off, though.
The Student is definitely one of the lesser-known and appreciated of the VW concept cars. This is a shame, because it’s a good reminder of what VW once did very well – making affordable cars that still retained some character and charm, and be things that one might actually choose to drive instead of being a car that you, you know, had to drive.
Oh well. Maybe one day VW will get back to their roots with cars like this one.
I always wished we had gotten the Up! GTI here in the US.
Torch is the one car journalist who makes me want a small gutless car like I had in my youth. Also, one with working bumpers that can get dinged without looking like a beater.
There is a woman in our neighborhood who has driven the same ‘71 Beetle since we moved here 37 years ago. How much better would our planet be if we all kept our cars going for decades? What if there was a modern low powered (clean tech) small car built to be refreshed with easy components?
“city car”
Oh, like the Honda…City? Ha ha
“sloppy driving, on your part or some other idiot’s”
This is true… we’ve all done something stupid while driving at one point or another
Don’t forget about the VW Fox that gapped the Lupo and UP!
I’m rather amazed that this is a concept car from ’82. I think the overall design would have fit in well a decade, perhaps two decades later. Very much ahead of its time, but in a highly understated way.
Those late seventies / early eighties fenderbumpers were great!
We had the Ritro/Strada Mk1 at home: All the metal between the wheels rusted like crazy, but those fenderbumpers held up SO much better than the rest and just went a little light from the sun (fixable with a heat gun if you wanted to)
I see much Lupo in it too (I owned 2 of the great 3Ls) with the large front side window and the small square rear side window. And those mag wheels also look like the ones on the Lupo 3L. Great concept really, that it was as spacious as a Passat in the front row, and only very small in the rear seat and luggage area.
I used to love riding in my family’s Strada when I was a kid, just a shame it rotted faster than a 5-year-old grows out of their shoes.
In the early 1980s, the car of the future was all the rage for German automakers. Jason wrote a great article about Opel’s answer to the Student on an obscure East German lighting page some time ago:
https://www.jalopnik.com/the-opel-junior-was-an-amazing-concept-car-with-an-elec-1845293830/
IAA 1981 saw a government-sponsored battle of the manufacturers over the Auto 2000. Even in my then seven-year-old opinion, the actual students with their Uni-Car won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Auto_2000
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_2000 (in German, but with a lot of links)
https://www.traumautoarchiv.de/html/7080.html (sorry, also in German)
Should have called it the VW Paris, or VW Montréal
The wraparound bumper/fenders even call out the Beetle in an abstract, conceptual kind of way. A shame this never got made.
I’d love something like this. The problem is convincing other people that they actually don’t love driving something enormous.
“Could you have put a radio in there?”
Sure in a Walkman knockoff hooked up via a bargain bin 3.5mm-RCA cable to a hidden flea market sourced, no name amplifier and two buzzy speakers in the doorcards kinda way.
Today it’d be a smartphone so you’d get SatNav too!
I got a ride from a girl in high school. She was rocking a Mercury Topaz. When you turned a right corner too hard, the turn signal stalk would fall off.
Anyways, despite the factory radio working, any kind of adapter to connect a Walkman was too technical for her.
So instead, she just duct taped two shitty computer speakers to the dash. Like, possibly from the dollar store, pointed at you like frog eyes, and hooked that to some off-brand portable CD player.
It was barely audible, but what you could hear, sounded like shit.
Well that’s certainly another, even crappier solution!
There is no basement when it comes to terrible audio installs. I had a friend with an old Corolla.
Instead of getting the correct speakers for the rear deck, there were just 6x9s sitting on the rear deck, with wires running into the gaping holes where the factory speakers once lived.
They were held in place purely through the speaker’s magnet. Then again, THAT car had the 1/4 windows spray painted black instead of window tint.
Let me guess: 6x9s for bass, which you don’t get with any speaker in free air like that.
Things I learned the hard way from my own bad install phase:
Coaxial speakers like those 6x9s probably were are funnels for sand right into the voice coils. I ruined a very nice pair of 3 way Polks that way.
Speaker boxes are big, heavy and absolutely not IMHAO worth the loss of cargo space. To teenage me they were cool but ONLY to teenage me.
My preferred music shows little to no benefit from a subwoofer. Or even 6x9s.
1WPC is plenty loud enough with the windows up and the car off.
10WPC is plenty loud with the car on and windows down
100 WPC WHAT?!?!
1000WPC OOOOOOOOOOO. Welcome to Tinnitus town.
Nobody thinks a setup is cool when all they can hear is the buzzy junk in the trunk.
Modern stock speakers, even cheap ones can sound much better with a half decent aftermarket touchscreen head unit.
Double and triple DIN dash holes are an endangered species and need protection under law.
12g cables are already overkill. Bigger is just heavier and more expensive.
The dark forces of audio marketing are ruthless, powerful and never, ever satisfied.
Oh I love a good setup. I always did the best install I could do at the time.
But these were just shit cars all the way around. She bought that Corolla as-is, and it felt like it was coming apart at the seams at 60mph.
It met it’s fate when some drunk in the middle of the day lost control and rolled his Explorer over top of it, flattening it like a pancake. Her driveway was one of those “slope to the basement garage” deals, and buddy rode up on to her lawn and rolled it off her front steps.
This was like noon and she lived near the end of a dead-end street. Safe to say, it was NOT a nice neighbourhood.
So that’s where Toyota got the inspo for their bz4x front bumper
Toyota is less “Student” and more “Unpaid Intern”.
The pictured example must have been drivable? It has balancing weights on the wheels.
VW’s production cars of the 70s/early 80s had some excellent “forgiving” features.
I drove an ’81 Rabbit (Golf I) for many years. The bumpers were aluminum channels on shock-absorbing mounts. On mine the rear driver’s side mount was slightly bent upwards, and the bumper itself had a small section that was slightly concave.
The guy I bought it from said he was rear-ended at a stop sign by someone going 25 mph! And that’s the only damage it caused.
I never fixed it, as I was a broke student at the time.
Try that in anything made in the last 20 years.
So you could say if you had this car and that happened, you were a “broke student” w/ a broke “Student?”
Ha ha
It’s strange to me that we have had phases in the us when city cars were around then disappear. Yet VW that is known for city cars and cheap cars never brought one to the US. That 1.2l tdi ludo would have done well with the misers that had used up their metros and other little 1.0l gas cars. Student could have competed well metro, fiesta, Hyundai, Kia, and yugo products. Of course when they do bring them in the misers complain about price and don’t buy it.
Learned a new thing today. Also goes to show how heavyweights like Hyundai really paid attention to all eras and culture beforehand. Lots of clever packaging and design ideas here that would be perfectly fitting for a modern car. I feel so sad for what could be, we’re getting wide MB screens instead.
This article makes me really want to see the Slate pickup in person.
i’ve seen 2 or 3 now and they do look like a viable entry-level, utilitarian option; it’ll be interesting to see how they do once released.
How come nobody mentioned the Ford Ka?
It had the same grey unpainted bumpers extending to the wheelarches for exactly the same reason.
Plus, the slightly upward-curved beltline and character line. Even the stance is astoundingly similar.
Uncle Adrian, there’s a call for you!
Torch I think you are correct in everything you write here. But as a person familiar with economics I was wondering how you think all this could be accomplished in conjunction with paying union workers sky high salary and vacation and retirement money while also meeting government safety demands in addition to environment expectations? All the stories I read everywhere always make good cases for one leg of this stool but they seldom combine 2 legs and never 3 legs.
I think “forgiveness” wouldn’t be relevant if people were just more careful with their own and others’ property.
I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice the design benefits of an “unforgiving” car. I don’t want us all driving glorified bumper cars.
Over the years I have learned to slow down and respect mine and others’ property. Frustration doesn’t mean go faster or harder now. But back when I was young I was a bit high strung and a “forgiving” car wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I don’t want us all driving bumper cars either, but maybe some of us should be?
Thanks Dad.
I’m going to be presumptuous and assume you don’t live in a large city?
The biggest city in my country, 6M+ people. But assume away!
Never knew! There is a lot to like in that small package with excellent sight lines! I’m dismayed that the entire industry has abandoned this ethos, and instead only offer dealer locked in maintenance by way of proprietary software defined vehicles that I will shun till death.
It’s not like these cars were capable of being built when they were ICE or now when they are EV. IF you have the government subsidize EVs at $20k a car and the car sells for $30k that car is still costing $50k it is just a different person paying for it.
Public Service Announcement when the government spends a billion dollars it is not free money it is a billion dollars coming from the tax payer. That in most cases is you.
Alas, only if VW had carried that project to fruition, especially since the timing would’ve been pretty good as seen with the more than modest popularity of contemporary (& slightly later) models such as the Toyota Tercel and…the Yugo. Mighty fascinating. Sometimes a little heart-wrenching to read about what could’ve been…
The name, the Student, is perhaps a bit cringey, as it kinda brings to mind the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids” meme. However, it could’ve been fun for students (heh) of early German cinema to get two matching Students with personalized plates, one saying OF PRAGUE and one saying EUGARP FO.
(In case anyone’s wondering, one of Germany’s earliest art horror films was The Student of Prague made in 1913 starringPaul Wegener who would go on to direct and star in the 1920 art horror film The Golem: How He Came into the World ; the plot involves a student who makes a deal with the devil which results in his reflection being stolen and brought to life as an evil doppelgänger.)
Carrying the theme further, the doppelgänger Student could be painted black à la the 1997 TV film The Love Bug which starred Bruce Campbell (!!) and John Hannah (also !!) and involved a rivalry between Herbie the Love Bug and its painted-black counterpart Horace the Hate Bug.
Yeah, a two-fer (heh) for cinephiles with The Student of Prague and The Love Bug…
Buell motorcycles did the molded in color panels thing for a bit. Always thought it made a ton of sense for a machine that’s even more prone to get scratched up (e.g. one that can’t stand on its own) than a car.
Bricklin also did it on the SV-1, but I don’t think people want to point to that as an example, generally
I had no idea; does fit with the mojo though. I actually saw one in the wild, on the road even, last month. Even better, it was in safety orange.
While I generally prefer metal over plastic due to the issue of microplastics I’d take molded in color plastic body panels over steel body panels on any regular automobile.
That being said aluminum body panels are also an option and with the right silver paint the bare aluminum underneath would match, so if severely scratched and or chipped you’d hardly be able to tell at a glance.
Yes but in the case of an accident aluminum is more likely to slice off a body part than plastic.
In a world filled with microplastics from single/low use items I wouldn’t be mad at the very low contribution from long lasting sources like automobiles.
I LOVE this little guy. Sold.
The thing that’s been missing from a lot of recent cheap cars is giving them enough charm, character, and style to make owners fall in love with them despite their spartan features, too many modern (late 20th/early 21st century) cheap cars seem like they’re intentionally designed to constantly remind people that they could have had the next more expensive model on the ladder for a few thousand more. This project seems like it was more in the mold of the Renault 5, classic Mini, or classic Beetle, the sort of affordable car that people might have genuinely enjoyed owning instead of feeling like they had been sentenced to own it by circumstances beyond their control
100% this.
That’s one thing the Mirage did well for a while.
I almost bought one back when they were still sold with manuals, sadly you could not get snow tires for it so I skipped it.
I’ve heard that the Kia Soul had that effect as well. I’ve never spent any time with one but I could see that.
It’s funny how most of the cars on this list are European or Asian, though Ford did produce some game offerings like the Fiesta (esp if you live in the UK); GM and Chrsysler on the other hand were mostly nothin’ but penalty box for ya you cheap bastard cars.
Long-term first generation Soul owner here. It absolutely had charm and personality. Mine was the “loaded” version, but even the base models didn’t feel like something you were stuck with. I still miss it a bit.
I wanted one of the EV Souls but they never sold the new ones in the US 🙁
I drove a Soul as a basic rental car in FL this past winter. Perhaps most surprising was how large it was, effectively it was the size of a Jeep XJ on the outside and more roomy on the inside. Plenty of room to carry 4 people with 1 carry on bag each.
It had start/stop engine cut off at lights which worked OK.
Only niggle in driving was taking off from a dead stop the accelerator was not smooth if you left it in regular ‘D’.
The trans did allow you to manually shift ‘gears’ (quotes bc I think it was simulated gears on a cvt), doing so through ‘3rd gear’ was much smoother and kind of fun
Yes because everyone is willing to spend additional money for a VW Vase for a plastic flower and forego something useful for the same money.
Or the Honda Fit/Jazz.
Make the owner proud of their car, and they’ll come back for another one.