🏎️ Max Finds Harley Quinn's Favorite Ride - '96 VW Polo Harlequin

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Good MORNING and happy beginning of Labor Day weekend, dear readers.

You hereby have my permission to take the rest of the day off. If your supervisor gets upset, blame me - your resident newsletter author and your BIGGEST PTO supporter.

Now, today’s vehicle will be a bit jarring to look at. And… you’re not going to believe me, but it isn’t some maniac’s Frankenstein car. Nope! It came like this from the factory.

HERE IT IS: A 1996 Volkswagen Polo Harlequin

What Makes The Polo Harlequin So Cool?

• Just LOOK at it!

• How it came to EXIST in the first place

• It was WAY more popular than expected

Today’s Edition is brought to you by Morning Brew

But First, the Highlights…

The base Polo, under this crazy shell, is a 1.4 liter 4 cylinder powered hot (kind of) hatch with a manual transmission. It’s not fast, but I bet 30 feels like 60 in this thing - and with the amount of looks you’d be getting while driving it, it might be the most attention you can buy from a mostly stock car under $15k.

The Harlequin trim is increasingly rare, so these will hold a pretty high value going forward. I doubt you’ll get it much below my predicted price, but I also bet it’ll never be worth less than what you buy it for. Stonks.

• 🌏️ Driven around the world: 4.72x

• 🎼 Song to Get the Vibes Right: Lovefool by The Cardigans

• 🏇 Can beat 60 horses in a fight

• 💰️ Predicted Price: $13,300

• 📆 Auction Ends: September 6th, 2023

Just LOOK at it!

This is NOT a custom paint job.

IT CAME LIKE THIS STRAIGHT FROM THE VW FACTORY. No joke. Pinky swear. Swear on your life.

Why? How? Wtf?

All great questions, dear reader.

Let’s start at the beginning.

First, what even is a VW Polo? It’s not something you often see in the USA. This one, in fact, was imported from Germany.

In the rest of the world, the Polo sits below the VW Golf in the VW hierarchy. It’s a small, entry level vehicle,

“Yeah yeah yeah I don’t care about that. How did the Harlequin Polo SPECIFICALLY come to exist?”

Fair.

We have to go back even further for that. It started, dear reader, WAYYYYY back in the 60s with this Beetle ad:

Looks familiar, right?

So, 30 years later & according to this incredible website (http://www.polo-harlekin.de/want35_11.html#Photo), when the ad team at VW was looking for some inspiration they found the above ad.

They thought, “DA, VEE SHOULD USE ZIS TO SHOW OFF THE PERZONALIZATION OF A POLO” (in all caps because, obviously, Germans think in yells too)

And instead of just creating paper ads showing off the 4 colors you could pick when ordering your polo, they decided to create a few Polo’s that were ALL FOUR colors. They’d bring these around to different auto shows as a kind of marketing stunt.

But then… something surprising happened.

People really wanted the Polo. And not just a Polo… they wanted the multicolored one.

VW got SO MUCH interest in this four colored clown car, they figured they may as well build a few of them for the public. Why not?

So they decided to build a thousand of them.

When those sold out, they sold a thousand more… and then a thousand more…

In the end, over 3800 of these crazy cars were sold to the public, with ads like this:

But, how were they actually built?

Well, if you look very closely at a few Harlequin’s, you might start to notice a few differences.

Namely, with which color panels go where.

Since the Harlequin was basically a mish-mash of the 4 normal colors available on the Polo (Tornado Red, Chagall Blue, Ginster Yellow, and Pistachio Green), VW would simply take a base Polo (in any of the 4 colors), and put different colored body panels on it, instead of the color matching ones.

You can tell the base color of a Harlequin by looking at the roof or in the door sills.

It’s worth noting too: you could not tell VW what color you wanted the base/roof/door sills to be. When you ordered it, it was completely random.

VW did this to eliminate parts waste & supply chain headaches if, inevitably, one base color became more popular than another.

The one for sale today, as we can see, is technically ‘Tornado Red’.

And, it looks to be in pretty great shape for a 30+ year old car with 118k miles.

You’re not going to win any races in it, unless you’re against a BMW Isetta, but you’ll DEFINITELY turn some heads,

And with good reason!

This is a rolling piece of the 90s. A statement from the era of grunge music, Tamagotchis, & “Fresh Prince”.

And it was truly a first in the automotive world. Perhaps a last.

Owning something like this is owning a true cult classic in the automotive realm. The Harlequin will grab attention wherever it goes, but you’ll really put a smile on the face of the folks who know where it came from… like you!

And remember…

MaxFindsCars.com is not, technically, free! By subscribing, dear reader, you have agreed to tell your friends about it.

In fact, I believe the contract specifically stated you had to each subscribe 100 of your closest friends, colleagues, enemies, exes, priests, pets, & sugar mommas. I’ll have to check the fine print to be sure, but you all may as well get started spreading the word in the meantime.

That's a wrap for today. New Editions come out every Monday & Friday! While you wait, go out and drive! And if you want more, be sure to follow Max’s Twitter (@maxjzin)

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IF YOU’RE FUNNY, MEAN, OR NICE ENOUGH, YOUR REVIEW MIGHT GET FEATURED IN A FUTURE NEWSLETTER…