The animal kingdom is alive and well in the northeastern Chicago neighborhood where I live. While maybe not as densely populated as other areas of the city that are closer to its core, Edgewater is still very much an urban area, with many giant residential towers on North Sheridan Road that border Lake Michigan, and a mixture of continuously adjacent mid-rise structures and single-family dwellings as one heads westward. On any given spring day, one may hear the loud squawking of Canada geese as they fly overhead, be awakened by the cheerful chirping of robins and cardinals in the early morning hours, and / or see the random rabbit or rat darting furtively across an alley. I have even seen a few raccoons, hawks, and what appeared to be coyotes here on the north side.
Berger Park. Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois. Friday, May 24, 2013.
I had even seen a couple of deer at a local lakefront park not far from a bus stop where I was deboarding. The one facing me above looked like it didn’t play, but I couldn’t not get a quick picture of it before heading on my way. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those deer, having wound up there, caught between Lake Michigan and a busy, four-lane thoroughfare, and at an intersection, no less. What chain of events had brought them to this spot, and where was their home? It’s not too hard to draw a metaphor between the trek of these deer to Berger Park and how life happenings can sometimes lead a human being to a place of danger outside of a safe, familiar space. A return to an inner place called “home” can feel all the sweeter after having experienced that separation and unease for whatever length of time.
Chicago typically gets about five minutes of spring, and this year has been no exception. We went from thick, wet snowflakes falling in the beginning of April to temperatures reaching just past the 90 degree Fahrenheit mark just four weeks later. I’m not complaining about either, but it is just my observation that the two times a year, in the spring and fall, when I’m able to have all my windows open seem all the more precious given that we are plunged almost immediately into summer’s heat or the chill of a windy winter. I’m happy that it’s again warm enough for me to resume taking my long, extended walks, like the one during which I had spotted our featured car. A couple of weeks ago, I had set out on foot to get to an area called Little India on a stretch of West Devon Avenue in a neighborhood called West Ridge when I came across this red Fox while on the way.
1981 Volkswagen Jetta print ad, as sourced from the internet.
It was in fantastic condition for any car of its era, and especially for an economy car. It was the first Fox I can recall having seen in a very long time, and it clearly looked well taken care of. The Fox was sold in North America from between 1987 and ’93, and it always seemed like something of an enigma to me. When had first seen them around, I honest-to-goodness thought that Volkswagen had dusted off the tooling for the first-generation Jetta, given it some updated mechanicals, made some minor tweaks to its exterior, and had given it a new name since the Mk II Jetta had gone on sale in the U.S. for model year ’85. This was not the case, with the Fox being slightly smaller in most dimensions than the first Jetta, with a wheelbase of 92.8″ (versus 94.5″), an overall length of 163.4″ (168.1″), and a height of 53.7″ (55.5″). A 63.0″ width was common to both cars.
By its second year, the base price of the Fox two-door had risen by $300, to $5,990.
The Fox was an imported version of the Volkswagen Gol that was designed and built in Brazil. All of them had a 1.8-liter, four-cylinder gasoline engine with 81 horsepower. Volkswagen had to have some idea that the Fox wasn’t going to be a runaway success in the U.S. even at its low price since there was no automatic transmission available, and many of us North Americans are lazy that way. (I love a manual transmission, though it has been years since I rowed through the gears.) Base cars had a four-speed, but only the GL Sport got an extra gear early in the Fox’s run. The regular GL would get the five-speed for ’91, which was the year the Fox got a minor exterior refresh. The other thing I thought was curious was the Fox’s availability as a two-door wagon, a body style that hadn’t been available in the U.S. following the last 1980 Ford Pinto.
At the West Devon Avenue shopping district, also known as “Little India”.
The Fox was competitively priced, but de-contented to a level I’m not sure I could have lived with as a new-car shopper. The ’87 Fox had a base price of just under $5,700, which was about the same as the Subaru Justy, while the Hyundai Excel had a starting price of about $700 less. Initial options were limited to metallic paint, air conditioning, and what was referred to as a stereo-prep package, since one couldn’t even specify a radio on the early cars. The Fox’s strong suits were said to be its handling and fuel economy, but they were also somewhat noisy and unsurprisingly not fast. I have no firsthand experience with one, but it was conceptually very similar to an ’85 Renault Encore that graced our driveway: a well-engineered economy car with some tie to Europe that was stripped to the bone, but fun to drive.
Over 188,400 were sold over its seven model years in the U.S., of which the ’88s were the most plentiful, with 56,900 sold. That figure represented a healthy 42% increase over first-year sales of 40,000, after which numbers continued to fall with each passing year. Our featured ’90 model is one of only about 22,600 total Foxes that found buyers that year, which was also the wagon’s last. Fewer than 6,700 units moved off dealer lots in final year ’93.
Another connection between the Fox and the West Devon Avenue shopping district was that they both had a distinctly multinational flavor. The Fox was a German-branded car that was designed and built in Brazil, and imported to North America. West Devon may be called “Little India”, but among its many retail storefronts and restaurants, there’s also representation from Pakistan, the Middle East, northern Africa, and other areas of the world.
As I walked down Devon Avenue on that warm Saturday afternoon, it felt like total immersion in one of the kinds of travel shows I enjoy watching so much. Hearing languages different than mine being spoken and seeing Roman characters and numerals next to Arabic script on adjacent storefronts made me think about what an amazing, wonderful thing it is to be part of this beautiful mosaic as a cohabitant of what the good people of Schoolhouse Rock had termed “The Great American Melting Pot“. As the son of a west African immigrant myself, my world has always been richer for all the diversity in it. It would be hard to imagine either the West Devon area or this Volkswagen Fox having even more international flavor than either possesses. The Fox never set the sales charts on fire here in the U.S., which makes this red two-door among my most prized “wildlife” spottings in Curbsideland so far this year.
Edgewater & West Ridge, Chicago, Illinois.
May 2022.
Related reading on the VW Fox from J.P. Cavanaugh may be found here.
I still have a little bit of a thing for the Fox. Or more accurately, a little bit of a thing for a Fox equipped the way it should have been equipped when VW was building it. The cheap, decontented version was fine, but we Americans are suckers for the upsell, and a GL/GLI trim with an automatic or 5 speed would have made up a majority of sales, IMHO.
If they had marketed the car and chosen color names with a sense of humor (as Ford did with the 1970 Maverick) this color should have been called Redd.
This is a cool sighting, especially in rusty Chicago!
The GL trim had nicer cloth upholstery, full wheel covers and a clock. At least at first it was bundled with the 4-door sedan or (last of its’ kind on the US market) 2-door wagon.
Later on a “GL Sport” 2-door sedan was offered with a 5-speed, the velour seats from the GL and alloy wheels.
It’s funny you mention the great Redd Foxx, because when I had first gotten these pictures, that was the direction I was leaning initially for this essay. I just couldn’t draw an effective parallel.
Even our strippo ’85 Renault Encore had an automatic. Before I learned to drive a stick as a teenager, the thought of doing so was intimidating.
That Fox really is in incredible condition for being what it is. There can’t be many of these left, especially in the Midwest. If these were in the same price range as the Excel or Justy, it seems like the Fox would give one a more substantial car for the money at that time.
As a young teenager I used to have a thing for the wagon version, and I used to dream of driving one on a solo adventure to Alaska, sleeping in the back (yes, I was a weird teenager). However I think one ride in a Fox would’ve dispelled that fantasy. And sadly my solo adventure dream has yet to materialize, since I went right into the corporate world after college in order to pay off student loans…
Sounds like the kind of dreams I had as a teenager, although it was a VW bus in my case.
It’s never too late…
You are right, it’s never too late. But this time I’d opt for a nice comfy van that I could stand up in. And bring the missus and the dogs.
Corey, I agree – the condition of this Fox stopped me in my tracks. I think part of the appeal of the wagon for some of us from a certain age group was that given that the Fox had such a low entry-level price point, the wagon represented a little extra substance and utility over a hatchback. And it was a two-door. I imagine it was capable of hauling a lot with the rear seats folded down. I did find some interior dimension info, but didn’t really feel the need to incorporate it into this particular essay.
That trip sounds like a great plan… sometimes I reflect on things I thought I might do when I was a little younger, and most of them still make me smile.
My sister’s boyfriend (they’ve been together for decades, it seems) had a VW Fox. He had purchased it new and put some absurdly high number of miles on it with little to no issue. However, if memory serves, when that car decided to retire, it quickly rolled over and died – not unlike an old fox, itself.
For as skittish as they are, deer are some bold creatures. We had one on the back patio last week, about ten feet from the kitchen sink. Had I knocked on the window, it would have no doubt ran off. Plus another one rubbed on my sassafras tree so bad it nearly killed the tree. And deer are almost as bad as chickens in crapping all over the place.
I’ve been naming the visiting bucks John and adding an “e” to their last name. 🙂
It’s funny – I don’t know if I would be able to recognize deer poop! One would think so, since there are so many deer in Michigan. Not in Flint, but in many surrounding areas.
The VW Fox strikes me as the kind of car that good maintenance would have kept running for a long time. I guess that’s like most cars. I don’t know if that sounded like an obvious statement…
What a nice find. These still remind me of the ’75 2 door Audi Fox I had. And deer, at least the ones here in the pacific northwest, can be downright mean to each other, especially during mating season.
Like people. 🙂
Could they have not sold well due to a poor choice of name? People might have still had memories of their Audi Fox? They were not exactly a pillar of reliability, although most German cars of the ’70s fell into that category.
I don’t remember reading anything particularly bad about the Audi Fox, but I did think the choice of name for this VW was interesting. The Audi Fox hadn’t even been gone from showrooms for a decade before this VW appeared.
Back in the first half of the ’80s, a friend and his wife purchased a brand new Fox. They got the base version for sure as the Fox was a big step up automotively for them (coming from an early ’70s Corolla wagon with Fred Flintstone floors and several hundred thousand on the clock) and they felt that the Fox, even without a radio (“Too fancy!!”), was about as high up the luxury ladder as any person ought to climb.
I rode in that car several times over the years and let’s just say that the Fox did little to inspire confidence. Its thin sheet metal seemed ready to collapse at the slightest hit. The doors closed with a bang. It had zero technology relative to passenger safety (other than belts, and I guess all things considered that lack of technology wasn’t too rare for the time). If I recall, they kept that car for a dozen-plus years until enough serious things broke and they had a child. It’s one thing to ride in a tin can, it’s another thing to strap an infant into one.
I write this as a person who owned a VW Rabbit at about the same time. My Rabbit (a Westmoreland-produced one no-less) exuded much more quality and seemed so much more solid.
It’s such a great point that once children enter the picture, one’s choice of vehicle becomes a much more important consideration versus something you just drive yourself. I’m saying this not as a parent, but with three siblings who are.
When I was looking up a few facts while putting this essay together, I came across one source that mentioned that the automated “mouse belts” were introduced at a certain point. I could imagine the low-tech VW Fox with the automated belts, though I could be mistaken in recalling what I read two weeks ago.
If I had been in shopping for a new car in the early 1990s, the Fox would have been high on my list. I drove one once, and it was nice… for a cheap car. A 5-spd. version would have been nicer, but regardless I would likely have chosen it over a used car, which was likely a common competitor for vehicles in this price class.
My ideal Fox would have been a 5-spd. wagon.
I’ve seen only one example in the past decade, which is the final-model-year (’93) example below. This too appeared to be in excellent shape.
And regarding urban wildlife, I live in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, and the wildlife that has become most common around here in recent years are… foxes. The mammal, not the VW. They’re all over the place, and I’ve seen one several times this spring stalking critters in my back yard.
Plus one for the foxes (the animals) of NoVA. I have a friend who lives in Reston and there are literally small herds of foxes running through his yard, out in broad daylight.
Here in MA, it’s the deer. When they’re not throwing themselves in front of cars at twilight, they’re eating your shrubbery (and pretty much all vegetation in their path) all night long. Oh, and the turkeys. They’re everywhere in the road…but no one seems to mess with the turkeys.
Your friend in Reston is right — the foxes are all over the place here. We see them in daylight most often in the spring, when they have kits to feed.
They’re fun to watch. Last month, I saw this fox (below) in my back yard. It was carrying a whole, processed chicken. Later on, I found the plastic packaging nearby. I think someone must have had groceries delivered to their door, and the fox helped itself before the owners could. It must have run off with a packaged chicken, ripped off the packaging, and then went back to its den. Looks like a happy fox.
I always thought the taillamps on the ’91 refresh made the non-wagon Foxes look even more like recycled, gen-one Jettas! Not at all in a bad way.
The $700 premium over the Hyundai Excel well worth it IMO. The Fox didn’t feel quite up to date, but had the basic goodness of 1980-ish VWs built into it.
I would have paid the extra $700 all day, even before we all learned about the early Excel’s issues. You summed up my initial impression of the Fox perfectly – not the most modern car, but with some inherently good dynamics based on the Volkswagen name.
My favorite body style is the 2-door wagon, and my absolute dream car is a slightly resto-modded 1964-5 Chevelle 2-door wagon. I’ve felt that way for a while, and certainly did when the Fox arrived in the US, with its 2-door wagon. I was sorely tempted, but more than a wee bit frightened of the unknown Brazilian parts and build quality.
I wound up with a 1989 Dodge Omni, which was by far the more pragmatic choice, but I’ll probably never own a 2-door wagon 🙁
There is something appealing about the two-door wagon body style. Conceptually, the Vega Kammback (if it had been properly fleshed out by GM) looked great, just for one example.
I had to look up the 1964.5 Chevelle two-door wagon, and I’m now a believer. Very cool-looking.
When I was in high school a friends father purchased a VW Fox instead of his usual
Buick. He seemed to have endless issues with it, and went back to Buicks till the end
of his days. I liked the looks, and wish I could remember, if I ever knew, the details of
the problems.
Cool. I find this particularly interesting because I think of most of Buick’s products from the ’80s being pretty much diametrically opposed to what VW was offering with the Fox. Even the small Buicks, down to the J-body Skylark, seemed to try to build in some level of Buick comfort and convenience. I’m sorry your friend’s dad had bad experiences with his. In doing a little research for this piece, I couldn’t really get a read on whether these Foxes generally skewed toward the reliable side, or not as much.
I haven’t seen one outside of Wolfsgart (the all-Euro car show every summer at the Champlain Valley fairgrounds in Essex, VT) in maybe 15 years, and only one or two there with wagons seeming to be the most common survivors or at least the most sought after although in 2021 there were two 2-door sedans.
There’s one sitting in a storage lot right off Hwy 99 in town, and I’ve meant for about a year to go shoot it. It’s right across the street from the VW dealer, and I’ve seen their cars parked there (back when they had a lot of inventory) so I suspect maybe it’s connected somehow. Did someone trade it in?
My parents owned a 1989 Fox 4-door that replaced their 1980 Pontiac Lemans wagon about 30 seconds before the transmission gave out. From new, the Fox was gutless, but the short wheelbase and sharp handling made it a good city car. My mother drove it most often and could really row through the gears expertly, with an instinctive feel for matching the gear to the speed and traffic conditions. The car did feel tinny and insubstantial and seemed to age quickly. The Fox was replaced by a 1996 Honda Civic, which was so much better on virtually every count, despite having an automatic.
Seeing wildlife in the city can be a startling reminder that we have moved into the homes of others, rather than the other way around. In my area of Dallas, bobcat sightings have become so frequent that animal control advises us not to leave small pets outside unattended.
Such an important point you make in the second paragraph, that the birds and animals share this space with us. I very much like the thought of that here in my own neighborhood.
Your memory of your mom shifting gears brought back a happy memory for me of watching my grandma row through the gears of their silver, ’79 Ford Fiesta. 🙂
In Latin America the Brazilian – built Voyage/Parati (2 and 4 door sedan / 2 door wagon) and Argentinian – built Senda (4 door sedan only) were very common middle class cars, as well as taxis. They were sold with several engines, including a 1.6 diesel outside of Brazil. Here in Uruguay the 4 doors were used as patrol cars also. They were so ubiquitous, easy to repair and had good resale value, that they were the car of choice. They were easy to soup up, there was a sport class for them (especially for the Gol, the 3 door hatchback from which they were derived). They were built in this style up to ’94 if memory serves right, when they were replaced by a wholly new styled car, only in hatchback or wagon 2 door version, and shortly after 4 doors were added. Those were also fantastically successful and only several years later came the transverse engined version.
Rafael, thank you both for this and also educating me (along with Slow Joe Crow, below) that the basis of the U.S. Fox wasn’t the Gol, but the Voyage! I honestly had no idea.
I’ll have to put a band-aid on this essay after work. 🙂 Thanks again! It is great to read that these cars had real success in markets other than the U.S.
The only difference between the Gol and the Voyage was that the Voyage had the water cooled inline four engines whereas the Gol had the air cooled boxer four. otherwise they were essentially the same car.
Thanks, Paul. I think I’ll leave the text as is only because I didn’t make any statements about the Brazilian versions of what we got as the Fox. I thought about a rewrite of that paragraph and ultimately didn’t think it was necessary.
I definitely remember the Fox since I was a regular visitor to the VW dealer in 87-92 to keep my cars running. Also a coworker had a Fox around 91 or so which I thought was a step down from the 84 Jetta GL I was driving at the time.
As side note, the Gol was the Brazilian only air cooled model powered by a front mounted Beetle engine. The export model seen in the US was the Voyage which had the ubiquitous VW/Audi OHC 4 although the Voyage had it set longitudinally like a VW Quantum or an Audi rather than the more usual Golf/Jetta/Scirocco style transverse engine
I was honestly surprised to read that the Fox’s external dimensions were that much smaller than the first-generation Jetta. I remember seeing certain exterior details on the Fox that seemed to clue me in that it was built to a price. The chunky, black plastic grille and headlight assembly panel was one of those details. The ’91 refresh added a few exterior refinements, but I see your point. Thanks also for the details about the Brazilian cars. I misread your comment earlier today on my lunch break and wasted panic thinking I needed to fix my essay. 🙂
Wow, what an amazingly clean car for being 32 years old. I was actually thinking of you this morning prior to seeing this, you being so closely associated here at CC with the city of Chicago, when I was wasting time watching this video on Youtube.
Its a 2021 tour through Chicago of the filming sites of the movie Backdraft, coincidentally shot in the same year as this Fox.
Thank you for linking this!
The other thought I had was that this ’90 Fox might have been freshly at the dealer’s lot when I got my mom to take me to look at that ’75 AMC Matador in the fall of ’89, as featured in my essay from last Tuesday.
I admired the Audi Fox back when I thought that I might become a Yuppie. It was available in a coupe and a four door sedan. Years later when I saw the Fox wagon I thought that it looked like a good idea. From what I’ve read, the Brazilian built cars were not comparable to the earlier Audi version in quality.
The VW Fox was very popular in Canada and I saw many in my shady used car days. The popularity of the Fox was despite the lack of automatic transmission.
Although the Fox was designed and built in Brazil, it drove like a German car. The seats in the GL model, for example, were taken right out of the Jetta GL of the era. VW was into its weird “E” period, where the transmission was advertised as 3+E. Given the flexibility of the EA827, it wasn’t much of an issue. Service costs were dirt cheap as every component was in VW’s international parts bin. I can remember paying $10 for Brazilian made brake rotors.
Did the Fox drive as nicely as a Jetta or Golf? Nope, but it was around half the money, too. I recommended a Fox to many friends as a good used car but nobody ever bought one.
I too had a taste for the Fox wagon. There was a tiny used car lot on the way to my aunt’s house that had a white wagon on the lot for months, maybe over a year, but my 85 GLC was only 6 or 8 years old, so I never stopped to look at the Fox.
The last time I saw a Fox, also a wagon, was at the Gilmore’s German show, several years ago. Horrible red paint job over what appeared to be the original yellow. Hole rusted in the floor near the driver’s footwell. And it was for sale. Hard pass.
It crossed my mind that the lack of an automatic trans, more than anything else, suggested to me that the car was intended to suck people into the showroom with it’s low price, so the people could then be upsold to a Golf or Jetta.
Blast from the past! I dated a girl in college who drove a four-door, four-speed version of the feature car. The first time I drove it, I had a hard time getting it through my head that you need to push down on the shifter to engage reverse. Three times or so the car rolled forward as I let out the clutch…nope! After that it was no problem.
I must confess that with the exception of the Chevrolet Chevette this was the last Brazilian car I could imagine being officially imported to the US. I wonder how feasible it was for VW to import it from Brazil which had very high taxes for anything in the industrial process instead of importing the VW Gacel (VW Voyage from 87 to 92) from Argentina, which already had an open market for exports and thus lower taxes at that time. Maybe the exchange rate for the Cr$ to U$ at 25:1 made the miracle.
I also wonder if the hatchback Gol would not be a wiser choice, as it has a Rabbit vibe and could catch the attention of younger buyers.
I love the Gol hatchback – it seems like the perfect in-between combination of Rabbit (Golf) and Scirocco. Maybe VW USA thought just the three body styles (two- and four-door sedans + wagon) were enough.
Nice find. I too always found the Fox to be an intriguing probability. When I was in junior high in the nineties, a friend’s older brother had one. He drove with the kind of shocking speed and disregard for safety that gives teenage males a bad name. I rode in it a few times and found it “fine”, basically on par with the standard economy cars of the era.
Much later, circa 2012, I was searching Craigslist for a fixer-upper car project. One I went to look at was a VW Fox, perhaps even the wagon, attractively priced around $500. When I saw the car I learned it had been driven to New Orleans from New York a couple of years previously. The rust had gotten to it, to an extent virtually never seen in the South. The floors were crunchy and the front drivers side suspension tower had broken loose and was pushed up to where the hood would barely close.
The owner was not aware of the structural failure and was a little disappointed when I told him the car was fit only for the junkyard. Too bad really, apart from the rust it seemed worth fixing. I ultimately got a 1982 Mercedes 300SD which was probably a better project.
As a 41 year owner of nothing but VW’s, back in the day when these were commonly available, my younger sisters were still relying on me to help them pick out their early cars (my youngest sister was still in College), I thought one of these would fit the bill for them. It was not to be, and I kind of learned that the type of car I like isn’t usually for other people who are, frankly, not me. Around 2000 I think I’d learned that lesson when my Father was kind of interested in a Passat, and I steered him to an Impala instead (the first of two he was to buy, the second of which my Sister now owns, and ended up as his last car). What I like in a car isn’t necessarily to the taste of someone else (even someone in my family).
Anyhow, back then, my sisters wanted a sporty car, with air conditioning/automatic. I tried to find some with somewhat low miles, as they couldn’t yet afford a new car, and especially small cars in central Texas seemed to acquire gobs of miles on them even with fairly recent model years. Back then automatics weren’t “automatically” common especially on smaller cars, which is also what they were looking for, so we had a harder time with our selection. Probably and automatic Fox wouldn’t have been a good choice, (and all my VWs including my current one have been standard transmission), but I thought since I was happy with my VW that my sister would have been as well.
Instead, they ended up buying almost the same car, in 4 iterations, a Nissan 200 (then later 240) SX….each sister owned 2 of them, my surviving “middle” sister still has her ’97 notchback she bought new. Before I owned my first VW, my college car was a 1974 Datsun 710 which I liked too, so I should have thought a bit about that and had them look at cars other than VW. I can’t project my interest in cars to other people who have different needs, nor should I try, but back then I thought one of these would have been a good match for my sisters.
VW stopped selling “cheaper than Golf/Jetta” models in the US right after these…I never thought the new Beetle was a cheaper Golf, since it was the same platform. Maybe they knew that SUVs /Crossovers were the future, and not trying to come up with a cheaper alternative to the Golf. Now the Jetta has taken over the low end, since sedans at least sell better than hatchbacks here. I miss the availability of basic cars…even my 2000 Golf is relatively plush with power windows/locks, and power steering, even cruise control (on a standard transmission as well).