Used Car of the Day: 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit GTI

Tim Healey
by Tim Healey

We're going hatchback today with this 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit GTI.


This car has a manual transmission and the seller, who has owned the car for six years, says it appears the mileage is accurate at 164K and that it appears the car has been well maintained and hasn't needed a major service.

The seller says the interior has been restored and has the original radio player, but the A/C is not connected and the rear wiper doesn't work.

Apparently, the body is rust-free. The seller says there is a box of spare parts, and the car is all stock except for a Neuspeed upper strut bar and Euro-style bumpers.

This Maryland-based ride is on sale for $10,500. Click here to check it out.

[Images: Seller]

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Tim Healey
Tim Healey

Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.

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3 of 24 comments
  • Golden2husky Golden2husky on Aug 15, 2023

    This is the very model that turned me on to the joys of driving a car that actually handled well. Thank you to my older brother for lending it to me for 2 months when he was in Nepal back in the day!

    • FreedMike FreedMike on Aug 15, 2023

      This. The O.G. GTI wasn't fast by any means (well, it was by 1983 standards), but it was an absolute joy to drive hard. It was light and tossable, and offered the kind of direct, unfiltered road feel that you just don't get much of today. I'd love to have one.





  • Wjtinfwb Wjtinfwb on Aug 15, 2023

    Nostalgia is a wonderful thing... allows us to remember times and things much more fondly than was the actual experience. I get chills every time I see a '79 Trans Am. Then remember what a horrendous owner experience it was and that a Honda Odyssey would leave it in the dust today. Same with these GTI's, the PA built VWs were between awful and terrible, depending on your definition. And the GTI's, while better in their day than most anything else (Escort GT, anyone?), they're pretty miserable compared to a more modern day ride. If you're buying to relive your childhood, great. If you're buying because you remember it being a fantastic car...

  • GregLocock They will unless you don't let them. Every car manufacturing country around the world protects their local manufacturers by a mixture of legal and quasi legal measures. The exception was Australia which used to be able to design and manufacture every component in a car (slight exaggeration) and did so for many years protected by local design rules and enormous tariffs. In a fit of ideological purity the tariffs were removed and the industry went down the plughole, as predicted. This was followed by the precision machine shops who made the tooling, and then the aircraft maintenance business went because the machine shops were closed. Also of course many of the other suppliers closed.The Chinese have the following advantagesSlave laborCheap electricityZero respect for IPLong term planning
  • MaintenanceCosts Yes, and our response is making it worse.In the rest of the world, all legacy brands are soon going to be what Volvo is today: a friendly Western name on products built more cheaply in China or in companies that are competing with China from the bottom on the cost side (Vietnam, India, etc.) This is already more or less the case in the Chinese market, will soon be the case in other Asian markets, and is eventually coming to the EU market.We are going to try to resist in the US market with politicians' crack - that is, tariffs. Economists don't really disagree on tariffs anymore. Their effect is to depress overall economic activity while sharply raising consumer prices in the tariff-imposing jurisdiction.The effect will be that we will mostly drive U.S.-built cars, but they will be inferior to those built in the rest of the world and will cost 3x-4x as much. Are you ready for your BMW X5 to be three versions old and cost $200k? Because on the current path that is what's coming. It may be overpriced crap that can't be sold in any other world market, but, hey, it was built in South Carolina.The right way to resist would be to try to form our own alliances with the low-cost producers, in which we open our markets to them while requiring adherence to basic labor and environmental standards. But Uncle Joe isn't quite ready to sign that kind of trade agreement, while the orange guy just wants to tell those countries to GFY and hitch up with China if they want a friend.
  • CEastwood Thy won't get recruits who want to become police officers . They'll get nuts who want to become The Green Hornet .
  • 1995 SC I stand by my assessment that Toyota put a bunch of "seasoned citizens" that cared not one iota about cars, asked them what they wanted and built it. This was the result. This thing makes a Honda Crosstour or whatever it was look like a Jag E type by comparison.
  • 1995 SC I feel like the people that were all in on EVs no longer are because they don't like Elon and that trump's (pun intended) any environmental concerns they had (or wanted to appear to have)
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