If you want a sensible everyday kind of car that can haul a couple people and their stuff across the city or across the country, but you also want something fun you can hustle on a country road, there’s nothing better than a hot hatch. There’s just something so great about a powerful little bulldog of a car that wants to torque-steer the wheel right out of your hands, and a stiff rear swaybar. You can have fun at low speeds in a hot hatch, but they’re also capable of some pretty impressive speeds in their own right.
There have been hundreds of great hot hatches made over the decades, but the one that really started the trend was built in Germany fifty years ago. The original Volkswagen Golf has been around since 1974 and the sporty GTI variant was introduced for 1976, setting the stage for everything that came after it. That original GTI was pretty great, but I think it was truly perfected in the MKII generation. The North America-only 2.0 16v GTI is my favorite, with around 140 horsepower on tap and plenty of torque, it’s a little ripper.
While I’ve picked the basic bitch answer to this question, surely the Jalopnik readership has better and more varied taste. I got rid of the standard answer, so you’ll all have to come up with something else. Let’s hear it, what is your favorite hatchback with a bit of spice to it? Sound off in the comments below with your pick for the best hot hatch of all time, and we’ll compile the answers later in the week to see who had the best picks. You all know you’re smarter than me, so flex your brain muscle and tell me what’s better than a MKII GTI. I bet you can’t.
