I bought an early 80s one as a winter beater in the 1990s. The reliability wasn't great. You could fix quite a bit on that car with just a 10mm Allen wrench,

I bought an early 80s one as a winter beater in the 1990s. The reliability wasn't great. You could fix quite a bit on that car with just a 10mm Allen wrench, which was just as well because you often had to. Only car I've ever had where once you turned the windshield wipers on, it was 50/50 that you could turn them off again (water leakage at the bottom left windshield corner dripped water directly onto the fuse box, which contained, among other things, the interval wiper module). I always carried a can of WD40 for its original purpose (look it up) to be sure to get the car started on damp days. The worn gearshift linkage had to be adjusted just so to be sure to be able to get into reverse and 5th. It drove great though, much peppier than a 70hp engine had any right to be. And my sisters had a first-gen GTI for a while and that thing was hot. Even the turbodiesel version was fun, sort of like the bottom half of the RPM range of the GTI. Lots of grunt, but halfway around the tach it was over. A later version of the Golf had its ECU mounted in... the rain gutter! What a logical place for that. Cars have come a long, long way since those days. Certainly my mom's somewhat recent Jetta seems as reliable as other modern cars.