Future Collectable: 1996 VW Golf 'Harlequin' edition

In 1996, Volkswagen made a ridiculous version of its Volkswagen Golf. It was called the "Harlequin". For the '96 model year only, VW offered its standard Golf with multi-coloured body panels. (later models even had a multi-coloured steering wheel.)

It was a crazy looking car, possibly made to honour an old VW Beetle ad, as Doug DeMunro has theorized. An estimated 264 Golfs were pulled off the assembly line, and had their body panels interchanged by hand to create multi-coloured versions of the car.

I must admit I thought these cars looked nuts when I first saw one at a VW dealership as a kid. You mean people would pay money for a car that looked like that? How incredibly ugly! 18 years later I think maybe Volkswagen might have been on to something, and perhaps unintentionally, created a car that will be a sought after collectable in a few years. Since the harlequins were standard Golfs, most were used as commuter cars and now have high mileage, or were heavily modified by VW gear heads looking for that extra bit of attention. To find a low-mileage un-modified car is probably a very rare thing. Especially considering their very limited original production run.

For this reason I think these machines will be collectable in the future (if they aren't already). They might have been very odd, but I think there are enough people out there who remember these, and wanted to own one, that the market should rise sharply for the Harlequins in the next 10 years or so. (if you can find one, as the guy from the  RossVW registry seems to be buying up a lot of them.)