They’re a strange lot, the Volkswagen “scene” mob. You’ll be familiar with their modus operandi, celebrating their individuality by hunting in homogenous packs. Banded steel wheels and cut-down springs, roof racks full of cod-artistic junk, staying up late into the night stripping the paint off their bonnets. Each one unique, just like all their friends. However, the most curious aspect of these regulated reactionaries is their choice of deity.
Volkswagen AG didn’t set out to cater for free spirits, real or otherwise. It’s a company built on the principles of mass production and cookie-cutter repetition. VW is a conservative company and not one for taking risks. It took them long enough to even try putting the engine in the right place. In recent years, every big player in the motor industry has become an expert in the sort of smoke and mirrors deception that is essential to sell cars these days. Customer choice is attractive but in reality the illusion of choice is often a trick, one that Volkswagen Group has become pretty good at. Forget the mirage of different models, option packs and Limited Editions. In reality, choice has become ever more restricted as Volkswagen AG hoovered up Audi, Seat and Skoda and gradually beat the life out them. The strategy of platform sharing, badge engineering and standardisation makes good business sense but the core brands basically consist of the same few products, repackaged.
Volkswagen’s blandness isn’t a new phenomenon of course. Although they played around with mad projects such as the Scirocco Bi-Motor in private, their showrooms were always stocked with dependable transport that wouldn’t upset the neighbours. When it comes to the Volkswagen brand, I could pretend that the last interesting production cars came out of Wolfsburg during the 1980s but even then I’d be wearing rose tinted spectacles. Cars like the B2 Passat are only really interesting now due their scarcity, and Mk2 Golfs are competent enough but hardly truly desirable. Even the hallowed Golf GTi 16v isn’t that exciting by any meaningful benchmark. However, from the 1990s onward, things really took a nosedive and set the template for the porridge of the present day. It’s therefore bizarre that the current VW “scene” has grown up around cars life-sapping enough to induce a coma. Am I being harsh when it comes to the limited imagination of Volkswagen AG? Well, I can only think of one instance in living memory when they generated a genuine surprise. I’m thinking of the bizarre Polo Harlequin.
The Third Generation Volkswagen Polo was a tedious dog-egg of a car. Vomited onto an expectant public in 1994, it was most notable for being the first time a five-door Polo had been offered, an innovation that was years behind the rest of the supermini competition. It was a dumpy looking thing and its tall sides made the wheels look like castors. It lacked the utilitarian charm of its predecessor and took itself far too seriously. Buyers were offered a range of unremarkable engines and imprisoned in sombre interiors that converted the available light to a depressing gloom. The driving experience was soporific and in 1.0-litre form the fetid thing could barely get out of its own way. The Mk3 Polo is a prime case study of everything a small car shouldn’t be. I’m not sure whether Volkswagen themselves secretly realised it was such a humourless damp squib, but something must have happened to spawn the peculiar Harlequin. Just like the simpletons who shout “oi-oi” when they enter the pub, winking and making sure everyone knows they’re a real character because they’re wearing a supposedly amusing hat, the tedious windbag of a Polo suddenly turned up in fancy dress.
The inspiration for the Harlequin (or Harlekin in the original German) seems to lie in an old marketing campaign from the 1960s. Volkswagen of America were wise enough to contract with advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach to stimulate sales of the cockroach-like Beetle. Starting with the “Think Small” campaign they traded on the fact the Beetle’s questionable charms were far removed from the norms peddled by Detroit. The Beetle was marketed with good humour and presented as honest and sensible transport, a characterful car that made more economic sense than the merry-go-round of model years from the Big Three. Unlike the car itself, the marketing approach was clever stuff. One of the key features that Volkswagen wanted to highlight was the Beetle’s cost effectiveness, specifically that although it was an import, it was as cheap to repair and maintain as any domestic product. To illustrate the point an advert was created depicting a Beetle assembled using panels from various model years in various colours, demonstrating the practical advantages of easy parts interchangeability.
Spool forward to the 1990s and while VW had premium aspirations, they weren’t widely regarded as hawkers of fun. Perhaps wanting to demonstrate the famous German sense of humour, someone in Wolfsburg hit on the idea of injecting some brio into the recalcitrant Polo by ripping off the idea of the technicolour Beetle. “What could be more agreeable than a multi-coloured car?” (was the question that nobody asked). Whilst we’re talking about marketing, it’s worth considering the origins of the Harlequin name. As you’ll be aware, the Harlequin character comes from 16th Century Italian theatre and played the role of the comic servant; nimble and astute but also seeking to get the better of his master, whilst being prone to mischievous and devious behaviour. The Harlequin may have appealed to theatre audiences with his brightly chequered costume, but he was basically what we might refer to in England as a git. With one eye on our international readership perhaps unfamiliar with English colloquialisms, I hereby list a few synonyms for “git” that I found on the internet. You may prefer unpleasant person, skunk, stinker, dirty dog, rotter, lowlife, rat or my personal favourite, stinkpot. As I have pointed out before, understanding motor car marketing is not my specialist subject.
Originally the Polo Harlequin was strictly limited to a mere 20 cars. However, demand was unexpectedly high and the concept was quickly put into full production for 1995, this time capped at 1,000 cars. The four paint colours were picked from the standard Polo palette; Tornado Red, Ginster Yellow, Pistachio Green and Chagall Blue. The tones might complement each other quite well but the process of actually building multi-coloured cars wasn’t easy. You can’t send a bodyshell through a spray booth and expect it to come out anything but monotone. It’s feasible to paint a contrasting roof, but painting each panel a different colour was a far bigger technical obstacle. Furthermore, the Harlequins were not all identical; in fact there were four different combinations available and this gives a clue to how VW achieved the feat. The base colour of any Harlequin can be identified by looking at the C-Pillar as each one started life as a normal Tornado Red, Ginster Yellow, Pistachio Green or Chagall Blue car. Unlikely as it may seem, the panels were then swapped between cars after going through the paint shop, according to a strict pattern for every base colour. Adherence to the pattern avoided colours repeating on neighbouring panels, whilst giving the illusion of a car assembled from random panels. Inside, the Polo Harlequin was almost disappointingly restrained with the seats trimmed in a subtle cloth, whilst under the bonnet lurked the 1.6-litre engine option so at least it wasn’t as uselessly slow as some of its stablemates.
VW chanced upon demand for such a jumble sale of a car and the original 1,000 units soon sold out. Production was extended once again and the final tally was four times the initial expectation. A small quantity of Polo Harlequins were built in right hand drive for the UK but for whatever reason we only got the 1.4-litre engine. Nevertheless, they found buyers amongst city-types desperate to look quirky. Buoyed by events in Europe, Volkswagen USA wanted a piece of the action and attempted to repeat the trick. The Polo wasn’t sold in the United States so they Harlequinised the Mk3 Golf instead, assembled in Mexico according to the same panel-swapping manufacturing logic. Pistachio Green and Chagall Blue were not featured in the standard Golf catalogue so these shades were unique to the Golf Harlequin. The Americans proved to be a much harder audience and many dealers were apparently less than happy to be allocated the strange cars. Only 264 were produced, a fraction of the European Polo venture, clearly indicating that American buyers had better taste than the rest of the world – a sentence you will never find repeated anywhere else. There are rumours of panels being swapped back to create homogenously coloured cars but that’s probably an urban myth. It’s more likely that some heavy discounting went on to finally get them shifted.
So what are we to make of the Harlequin concept today? As a youngtimer curiosity, Harlequins are quite interesting and the world would be a duller place if they had never happened, but I can’t ever see myself wanting one. I just don’t fancy driving a car that looks like a child has made it using scavenged Lego bricks. In fact, if a child did make such a thing, I’d clip it round the ear and tell it to try harder. I believe they’re quite sought after in the VW “scene” though. Perhaps some paint stripper, a roof rack and some banded steel wheels are the answer after all…
