Our neighbor had an extremely low-mileage Volkswagen Rabbit (Mk1 Golf for those outside the USA) sitting in his driveway. He bought it brand new for his wife, and wound up getting divorced over it because she loathed the thing and refused to drive it! I offered him a few hundred bucks for it, and had to spend my next two college job pay checks buying all of the parts to replace the rusty brakes so that it would even roll.
VW used a Solex 1-barrel carburetor on the thing, which was obviously a leftover from the aircooled Beetle factory when production stopped. The intake was sooooo restricted that it couldn't get out of its own way, and holding highway speed on the slightest incline was not happening even with a tailwind. The only car ever produced that was slower than that thing was the VW diesels of that era, and those were noted for measuring 0-60 MPH test runs using a calendar.
Long story short, I installed a performance exhaust on it. One of the mechanics at our local BMW motorcycle shop drag-raced MOPAR 4-bangers at the time, and Dodge was buying engines from VW at the time because they couldn't make their own. One or two
of those parts migrated under the hood of my poor Rabbit, including a 2-barrel Weber downdraft carb from lord knows what and an intake manifold hogged out so thin that you could almost see light through it. When everything was finally un-corked, it was flowing so freely that it would stall if I opened the throttle too fast due to the sudden loss of vacuum to draw in the air/fuel.
Anyway, I drove that car for several years. The unibody ultimately weakened from the fatigue from the engine's power, and I snapped three windshields from being overly aggressive with the throttle in the last year of ownership before I sent it to the scrap yard. Do I wish that I still had it? No, it was past the point of being safe to drive on the road, and needed to be crushed.
Would I buy another one today? Up until a few years ago, the answer would have been *yes* if a solid 1983-84 Mk1 GTI came along. What changed my mind is that a colleague from work sent me a link to one for sale on bring-a-trailer, and seeing the interior pictures made me remember how primitive those early 1980's cars were. It was almost as sparse as my old mid-80's Jeep CJ-7, which is another vehicle of mine that was put out to pasture when it got too rusty to drive safely...and I wouldn't want another one of those, either.
The reason why I like my BMW i3 so much is that it feels like a natural evolution of the Mk1 Golf/Rabbit. Both are light, chuckable in corners, and have skinny tires that make lateral grip challenging for the loose nut behind the wheel. (I have my weekend toy in the race car hauler if I want to go faster.) Being made with carbon fiber and aluminum, I expect the i3 to last for the rest of my lifetime because it can't rust.....