Through a mystifying series of events, we have driven one of the rarest cars in America. This is the only car of its kind here. To put it in perspective, there are three times as many Lamborghini Veneno Roadsters soon to be roaming this great nation of ours. Each Veneno costs $4.5 million. And still, none will be more rare than this Scirocco.
To the untrained eye it looks just like a Golf — and, indeed, with the model’s ubiquity, it may have explained why no one hooted and hollered, why nobody pulled alongside waving camera phones. Bad for the ego, but good for traffic safety information. (Had we wanted real, genuine, nerdy attention, the two-hour trip to Irvine for Cars and Coffee would have yielded arcane questions about the Scirocco for hours.)
It may be a Golf, but there are some beautifully subtle curves in here. The hips flow outward past the B-pillar, flowing and wide and sultry in a way Volkswagens never are. The roofline swoops downward, past an upturned window cutout that mimics the original Scirocco. There’s a small upward turn on the spoiler, above the rear hatch glass, that recalls the ducktails of vintage Porsche 911s. (It’s offset, sadly, by primitive humps that hide the rear hatch’s hinges — c’mon, Volkswagen, those couldn’t have been integrated cleanly?) This is Volkswagen design at its best, and simultaneously most rational, exactly what a Golf should look like when stripped of practical pretenses.
The swooping roofline works, too. Kind of. Rear visibility takes a hit, understandably. But a 6-foot-3 tall friend rode shotgun as we drove across Los Angeles at night. “This is all the headroom anyone needs,” he remarked. “The Golf is too tall. But this, this is just fine for me.” The rear also offers plenty of headroom — along with sculpted elbow rests with real, genuine padding that threatens to elevate the rear buckets beyond prison cell. The seats themselves are wonderfully sculpted, the bolsters coddling, and they’re wide enough for American and German alike. (With Germany recently being the fattest country in the EU, these seats arrived just in time.)
Driving the Scirocco is a delight, especially at a speed as befitting its looks. Sixty mph comes at around five seconds; turbo lag isn’t a technological demon to be slain but rather part of the Scirocco R’s laughing, giggling motoring experience. Yes, this is a front-drive car — on twisty roads, it behooves the driver to turn off the stringent traction nannies, as it will plow and shriek if harried. Take off from an intersection and the front axles clank and clunk, like they’re tearing themselves asunder. The wheel hop is exacerbated by the fact that this Scirocco has 12,000 hard-driven miles, every one a story. Mostly one told through shouting and possible breakage.
Being European, our car came with the trick adaptive dampers, an object of Volkswagen contention in the sense that they’re absent from these shores. “Too expensive,” say the product planners. You know what? They may be right. There are distinct differences between Comfort, Sport, and Normal settings — Sport is rather jittery, while Comfort allows some slack in body motions — but all settings worked well for adventurous driving, and overall, they’re too subtle to justify the equipment.
