INHERITED TRAITS

DNA, ADAPTIVE RADIATION, AND THE VW GOLF

- MIKE SPINELLI

AS SURE AS MECHANICAL pencils have different-size leads, automotive designers love to talk about “DNA,” referring to the styling traits that signal a car brand’s bloodline across generations: BMW’s consistent Hofmeister kink along the side windows, Jeep’s seven-slot grille, the Porsche 911’s silhouette. Familial DNA runs deeper as well, through engineering philosophies and platforms that echo from one generation to the next.

The evolutionary term that applies here is adaptive radiation. That’s when a single ancestor diversifies into a burst of new forms, each filling a niche, exploiting a resource, or responding to a change in the environment. A textbook case is Darwin’s finches of the Galápagos; their beaks adapted to suit different food sources across the island chain. Another is the Volkswagen Golf of Wolfsburg, which sits atop a dazzling throne of heredity.

The original Golf is the common ancestor of eight generations of progeny that represent an entire ecosystem. Like those finches, this lineage, presented here by earliest evidence of production, includes variations in body styles, performance characteristics, and capabilities. Yet all bear the familial stamp of Golf DNA.

THE COMMON ANCESTOR

1. Golf, 1974

The successor to the air-cooled Beetle had to adapt to new safety and emissions mandates yet appeal to buyers everywhere. The first Golf met the moment with a water-cooled engine up front driving the front wheels. Giorgetto Giugiaro’s crisp exterior design codified the hatchback as the template for versatile economy cars. The Golf was compact but roomy, affordable but refined, and adaptable enough to spawn new products, as VW would demonstrate over the next five decades.