A great story from All Cars Electric's Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield: When I met last month with Volkswagen to ride inside a prototype 2012 Golf Blue e-motion, I was eager to experience this all-electric version of its popular 2011 Golf hatchback. It will go into production as a 2013 model. But I also knew something the VW public relations corps didn't: the location of an electric car that VW had built some 25 years earlier--which they assumed had been lost forever.In fact, Volkswagen has experimented with electric cars since the 1970s, when the Volkswagen Golf (Rabbit) platform was first produced. Starting with the Mark I Golf, VW engineers replaced the gasoline engine with an all-electric drivetrain. Built in extremely limited numbers, the car gave rise to the Mark II Golf CityStromer. No, not a typo: "Stromer" comes from the German word "Strom", or "Current." Although in the tradition of poorly chosen names for EVs, some German speakers have told me that "Stromer" can also mean "Hobo".
Only a hundred or so left-hand-drive and just two-right-hand drive Mark II examples were made. Through nothing more than serendipity and a few contacts, early last year I found myself the owner of one of the two RHD examples. Read more...
