Street-Spotted: VW Rabbit Cabriolet, but Not on a College Campus

For a car that was seemingly everywhere in the 1980s and beyond, the Volkswagen Rabbit is hard to spot on the road today, at least outside of Portland neighborhoods still well stocked with machinery from that era under a few pounds of pine needles.

But there's a good reason for the Rabbit Cabriolet's popularity: It was offered stateside from the 1980 model year through 1993, which assured its status in the GenX College Car Hall of Fame, while overlapping with sales of the Mk2 and Mk3 Golf.

But like the VW New Beetle Cabrio, the Rabbit Cabriolet was not in the lineup from the start. In fact, it took a while for this version to materialize.

The base Mk1 Golf itself debuted in 1975 as a hatchback, quickly winning over Europe and, given enough time, Malaise-weary US buyers seeking to escape the indignities of downsized domestic fare. The arrival of the Golf, sold as a Rabbit stateside, was a landmark event for VW and for European hatchbacks that's kind of difficult to appreciate today, or even explain to a younger audience.

A full four years into Golf/Rabbit production, a cabriolet version was created by Karmann GmbH alongside a similar Jetta cabrio prototype, both featuring the now-familiar roll bar.

The Rabbit Cabriolet was not a lavish car on the inside even by the day's standards, but VW by now had fully figured out how to play up a car's appeal to sell it as something far more premium than it really was.

"The Cabriolet is as much a frame of mind as it is an automobile. For it harkens back to a time when open air touring was the epitome of automotive excitement," ad copy of the time whispered.