Long time ago I made my license, training in a Golf III,
I quite liked it. It had a much more utilitarian feel to it than today's Volkswagen-Golfs and the rest of the small-to-compact FWD-stuff they are offering right now.
Then I discovered that my family's boring old Merc had some pretty good treat in store: RWD
I still drive it today - almost exclusively that is. I used to think back to the Golf III and thought... ..."never seen anything "VW" that good-looking, again". Then I started to notice that nearly every affordable VW on sale was either a very dark shade of gray or mostly deep-grainy black inside. I started to wander more and found I liked my trusty old Merc's blue-wooden (real wood, yet not too much of it!) trim inside to grow on me, slowly-but-surely.
Then VW started to build "ESP" into their cars. At the same time they did away with any option (most of their cars) to deactivate it. While maintaining a "ESP-free" fleet of vans and van-like cars (I'm purely talking about Germany, here)...
...Then the Scirocco came. I just thought: "What a surprisingly good-looking VW" and found out later, even the LFS-devs announced to reproduce it in their Sim - "authentically with all its superior driving aids [and bells&whistles]".
In the meantime Mercs of new would adapt to their newly found product-policy (nicked from VW adverts) to include as much health-and-safety as they can into each and every car, whether it needed it (A-Class) or not. And like VW they forgot the single possibility to redeem themselves upon true driving enthusiasts, Ladies and Gentlemen on the track and beyond, I'm talking about the
ESP-OFF-SWITCH
Some models might have a fake one installed into their mostly god-awful "dashboard" or whatever they use to call these things today. But don't be fooled. If you try to switch off the esp in your car, nothing big will happen. Yes, you can still catch fire while running straight into the next tree, if that pleases you. But you could do this with ESP-ON, anyway. And some drivers - I believe - would definitely deserve this self-inflicted form of natural selection more than others (but that's a different story)
So now we have it. The (now) second-least-driver-oriented marque in the world (tm) with the most uninteresting interpretation of a WRC-car... (that barely even has any resemblance to a car with the same name you could actually buy) ... in the whole wide world. Wow, that's a quite well-fitting match, don't you think?
Anyway, what on earth was the management at VW thinking when green-lighting a WRC-car without using the concurrent Scirocco-design as their modeling base?
The real "Polo", I agree, is a much newer car (or might be, because a I cannot really recall the last time I actively noticed a brand-new one, they all look the same to me)...
...but boy oh boy does it look fat. And I don't mean dirty-Harry-in-the-pants kind of "fat" -- just ordinarily "I had a few too much X-Large QuarterPounderWithCheeseMenu - kind of _FAT_
Greets
and let the loathing begin... (I don't care, anyway)
Subaru, get your act together and show them hideous newguys their place! Citroen: You're building cars that at least look the part: Make your move, now! And play your cards wisely. Because VW plays dirty with lots of Skoda-DNA and their newly inherited co-worker "Walter Röhrl" after they shot Porsche on the stock-exchange :P
What - A - Wonderful - World!
