Watch out for those headlines!
Volkswagen itself once went wild with the Country, a high-riding Golf II with four-wheel drive. In the early 90s, however, there was an Italian creation, the Biagini Passo, and that creature based on a Golf Cabrio also sat high on its wheels. Like the Country, it was equipped with Syncro-4×4. The Italian product was a kind of Frankenstein, as it also had parts that had nothing to do with Volkswagens and came from brands like Fiat and Opel.
If you see one of the perhaps 60 examples of the Biagini Passo that were ever built, you don’t immediately think of a Golf. Yet there is a lot of Golf in this Italian. Biagini produced the off-road convertible from 1990 to 1993. The car, for which they took the Golf I Cabriolet as a starting point, received the Syncro four-wheel drive from the Golf II Country, and under the hood was the 1.8 with 98 hp, which also served in the high-riding Golf II and the Golf I Cabrio. Like that ‘Strawberry Basket’, the Passo has a roll bar on the B-pillars and the basic bodywork was also taken from the Cabriolet. But that does not apply to the add-on parts. The taillights come from the Opel Kadett D, the headlights from the Fiat Panda, and the indicators from the Fiat Ritmo. The dashboard comes from the Golf I Cabrio but it is provided with an extra layer.
In short, quite a hodgepodge, but it’s a funny thing. Volkswagen had 7,735 examples of the Golf Country built by Steyr in Austria. The Passo, which was considerably more expensive than the Country, only found about 60 buyers. These were found in Germany and Italy.
In fact, you can see the Biagini Passo as a kind of precursor to the T-Roc Cabriolet, which was recently unveiled.
