Junkyard Find: 1988 Volkswagen Fox Station Wagon
In the 1970s, the Audi 80 was sold in the United States as the Audi Fox. In the following decade, Volkswagen decided to sell the Brazilian-made Volkswagen Gol as a Volkswagen Fox in the United States, presumably using the Fox name because it was so good.
The Fox was cheap and disposable and most were crushed before the end of the 1990s, so this ’88 wagon is an unusual find these days.
I found this car in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it wears the KPFA sticker mandated for all aging German (or Brazilo-German) station wagons in the region. I’m sure that, at some point in the early 1990s, I was stuck behind this car going 15 under the speed limit while driving my ’65 Impala in Berkeley.
This one made it to over 200,000 miles on the odometer, which is pretty good for any 1980s car, much less a Brazilian one.
The two-door wagon had fallen out of favor among American car shoppers by, oh, about the late 1950s, but the Fox wagon was really more of an elongated hatchback than a true wagon (though it did have a proper wagon-grade tailgate).
It was the lowest-priced wagon in America, according to this ad. A bit of research shows that the ’87 Fox wagon listed at $6,590, while the ’87 Ford Escort wagon was $7,312. The larger Plymouth Reliant-K wagon was $8,579, while Honda priced Civic wagons well over 10 grand.
The Fox devours the competition!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I really enjoyed my Audi Fox. It was light enough to push by myself!
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I am fairly certain that one could not get an automatic transmission or power-assisted steering on any VW Fox (US market at least) of this era, am I right?