km : Daily Driver

As a veteran of seven straight Volkswagen Golfs (pretending for a moment that I never bought the Saab 900 between the first and second VWs), I speak from personal experience that one of my early attractions was the plethora of aftermarket pieces with which I could personalize them. From shift knobs to steering wheels, lumpier cams to freer-flowing exhausts, tacky body kits to over-the-top lighting, just about anything you could wish to “improve upon” exists someplace in the world for the Golf. That’s how it goes when you’re the best-selling non-appliance car in the world (Corollas don’t seem to attract the same degree of personalizers), and it continues to this day with the sixth generation of the car, which includes our long-term GTI.

I’ll confess that not only am I a veteran of the Golf, I also have a long-reaching (but thankfully brief) history with fake carbon fiber on their interiors. My first (and last) encounter came back in 1994, when the black wünderFaser was really starting to rear its darkly woven head. Thank MacLaren’s F1 supercar or maybe Speed Channel’s flirtation with DTM racing coverage for making the shimmering cloth — with its distinctive pattern, inherent strength, unparalleled lightness and unobtainium pricetag — so popular almost overnight, setting off a tsunami of carbon-look products in the final years of the Twentieth Century. Among the myriad of poorly-replicated, distorted checkerboard patterns, one company stood out for its realistic-looking facsimile applied to a do-it-yourself vinyl film. I had to have it!

As I recall, I spent about $50 on enough vinyl to cover all of the smooth surfaces of my ’94 Golf’s dash and center stack, as well as the grille, which to my eyes looked just plain wrong in body color. Over the course of several days, I popped apart all of the Lego-like panels that made up the dash trim and carefully prepped their surfaces before patiently applying my fake carbon tape to their surfaces. The results, especially considering the period, were pretty convincing. No one but no one I knew had real carbon fiber back then, but thanks to a job well done, plenty of people thought I did.



Now, as my good friend (not really) and comedian Ron White is fond of saying (because he gets paid lots of money for it), I told you that story so that I could tell you this one. While we wait for a couple more performance upgrades to arrive so that we can dig into the nether regions of our 2010 GTI, we decided to give the interior a little attention. Not that we originally planned to — we like the standard setup with its plaid-to-the-bone Interlagos cloth seating just fine — but rather because Volkswagen asked us to try out one of the available accessory kits to dress up the dashboard. In faux carbon fiber.

The kit consists of seven vacuum-molded plastic overlays with a realistic-ish carbon fiber graphic applied to them. Unlike my previous work, they are pre-trimmed and ready to install with double-sided tape over the existing dash and door trim. As fake carbon fiber goes, the pattern is fairly convincing thanks to multiple passes of the printing process that give it an honest-to-goodness three-dimensional surface. It even shimmers as the light travels across its various elevations. All in all, it’s really not too bad.

We had mixed feelings about this install from the beginning. In fact, the pieces sat virtually untouched on a cabinet for a while; various staffers would walk by, pick up a piece, flex it and check out the pattern before putting back in the box and walking away. Part of the reluctance to install them stemmed from the fact that it’s 2010, and real carbon fiber isn’t as rare and exotic as it was way back. Most third-graders can discern the faux fiber from an iPhone pic, and who wants to be called out by the chocolate-milk posse? But really the bigger issue had to do with the fact that the factory trim, with its dark- and light-grey striped pattern edged tastefully in real aluminum, is actually pretty nice to look at on its own. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the aluminum accents would end up buried beneath the plastic mask.



Nevertheless, editorial duty calls. We owed our friends in VW’s aftersales department the opportunity to have our (their) GTI shown with the kit installed. A quick wipe of all the surfaces with the supplied prep pads had the original panels ready for burial. A heat gun activated the pre-applied adhesive strips on the backsides of all the carbon-like trim, and with a firm press and roll, each part was set in place. The whole process took less than half an hour.

We have to admit that the carbon-look panels aren’t half-bad-looking, but we really do miss the aluminum accents, just as we suspected. Our only real gripe is that the surfaces are so shiny we often can’t even tell there’s a carbon effect on them. Which brings us to our final thought.

Round about 1996, or maybe it was early ’97, I grew tired of the fake look. Since I couldn’t afford any of the real carbon fiber dash kits that were finally emerging (and since most of those early ones looked worse than my tape job), I decided to peel it off and go for a new look. When I sold it in 1999, it still wore Tornado Red paint everywhere the vinyl had been, a perfect match for the vibrant exterior. Oh yeah, those were the days…

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