By Mark Spence
I love a good mystery. Like most car guys, I also love hanging around a junkyard. The possibility of finding a good part brings me joy, but plenty of trips can give me the “why is this here” thought. I’ve seen everything from clapped-out Porsches to an SR20 that still ran in a 240SX. Someone else, however, found something… quite unique.
These yards are paying scrap prices for these cars. I’m active on a lot of junkyard Facebook groups, and a recent post caught my attention. This is a Mk3 Volkswagen Jetta that someone had turned into a coupe!
Volkswagen made a Mk1 and Mk2 Jetta two door. The Mk3? Nope. A handful were built by enthusiasts, and last month a fellow VW fan up in Massachusetts stumbled across this gem on the bottom of a sad stack. They tossed a picture of it up on the Facebook page, shocked over their find because you never see one of these.
I then reposted the pictures on a VW Mk3 page, looking for answers. From the pics, you can tell it was a well built car. Note the roof not buckling. Also, this one even had a TDI engine in it at one point. It’s odd that someone put so much work into this car for it to just get junked.
The VW community is a pretty tight group of people who have been brand fans for decades and the old heads were heavy in the Vortex forum, yet this mystery car has lots of people scratching their heads. Sadly, the car has since been crushed before the Internet could figure out its past, but I’m still intrigued by its mystery.
Jeff Glucker
very cool, good spot. looks like a Golf back window?
i saw a 5-door EK civic hatchback on craigslist once. no reference to it in the ad, no explanation of how it came to be, nothing. i’ve since seen one or two more forum threads, facebook posts, etc about welding the back of a hatchback to the front of a sedan to achieve the same result, but it just seems like a huge amount of work to then turn around and put on craigslist at the same price as a regular civic.
it’s not a Jetta, it’s a european VW Vento Coupe.
On first glance I thought this was a heavily modded MK2. It looks like a lot of time and money went into this. That said, the interior also has me wondering if it was ever finished as it looks like a lot of that stuff might have been missing before it wound up in the junkyard.