By the late 1970s, Volkswagen had managed to overhaul their entire model range. The Golf, Polo, and Passat had transformed Volkswagen’s design and modernised the company. Riding on a wave of success, Volkswagen began working on a car that they felt would become extremely popular- a supermini saloon.
To create this new supermini saloon, Volkswagen would use the chassis from their existing supermini- the Polo- and merge it with a saloon body. The three-section body was essentially a lengthened version of the Polo’s body. The car would also feature the Polo’s range of engines. These sizes ranged from the 0.9-litre inline-4 to the 1.3-litre inline-4. Power ranged from 40 horsepower to 60 horsepower and all the cars only featured a four-speed manual gearbox. Most of the parts for this car were shared not only with the Polo but also with the Audi 50.
The car- named the Derby- was released to the public in 1977 and received wide acclaim. It sold well instantly, with over 72,000 cars sold in just 1977. As such, Volkswagen would focus on continuing to upgrade the Derby. The car would receive a major facelift in 1979, with major changes to the exterior. In 1981, Volkswagen would also introduce an economy version of the car, which featured longer gear ratios, and also had stop-start functionality, which would turn off the engine when the car was idling. As such, the Derby had become quite advanced from when it was launched.
However, despite all these improvements, the sales for the Derby had started to decline. Also, despite Volkswagen’s best efforts to differentiate the design between the Polo and the Derby, the similarities between the two vehicles meant that most customers were choosing to buy the much more popular Polo. As such, by 1984, Volkswagen merged the Polo and the Derby models, with the Derby becoming the Polo Classic and later simply the Polo Saloon. These changes did lead to a major rise in sales.
While the Derby may not have survived as a model of its own, Volkswagen would give another go to the ‘convert a hatchback into a saloon’ experiment, this time with the Golf. The second try did end up being much more positive, with the experiment resulting in the Volkswagen Jetta, which is one of the best-selling vehicles of all time.
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