1973 Fastback (Type 3)

Volkswagen's designers understood something that Detroit took decades to learn: if you're going to make a practical car, you might as well make it good-looking too. The Type 3 Fastback — the 1600TL, as it was known in Europe — wore a swooping, low roofline that transformed the Type 3's boxy competence into something approaching elegance.

By 1973, the Fastback had been perfected through a decade of production. The body was still clean, the roofline still fluid. The engine was now the 1,584cc AB unit producing 54 horsepower — the best the Type 3 ever received. It was going out the way good things should: at the top of its form.

The Type 3 Fastback used the same pancake flat-four architecture as the Squareback and Notchback, lowered in the tail to enable a fastback roofline that swept cleanly rearward. The practical benefit was a genuine luggage area beneath the sloping glass, accessible via a rear hatch. The aesthetic benefit was a profile that bore a family resemblance to purpose-built sports coupes.

The 1973 AB engine in 1,584cc form produced 54 horsepower and could be paired with either a four-speed manual or three-speed automatic. Fuel injection was available on certain market specifications. The same vivid color palette as the 1973 Squareback — Yukon Yellow, Pumpkin Orange, Marina Blue — gave the Fastback a graphic energy that the shape carried well.

The Fastback was the Type 3 for people who wanted the practical argument delivered in a more persuasive package. The Squareback said 'sensible.' The Fastback said 'sensible, but look at this.' The roofline was genuinely beautiful — a long, descending arc that made the car look faster than it was, and that translated its air-cooled honesty into something more aerodynamically intentional.

On the Bosch D-Jetronic-equipped variants, the Fastback was also a genuine engineering statement. Fuel injection on a sub-$3,000 car in 1973 was not a trivial thing. VW did it because the technology was right, not because it moved metal.

The 1973 Fastback arrived into a year of endings. The Vietnam War was winding down. Watergate was unwinding the Nixon presidency. The oil embargo was ending American innocence about energy. The automotive industry was looking at a decade of constraint and trying to decide what to build.

The Type 3 Fastback had spent ten years arguing that constraint and quality could coexist. In its last year, that argument felt less like marketing and more like prophecy. The car that had been efficient and considered from the beginning was suddenly the car that everyone else was trying to become.

The 1973 Fastback was the most accomplished driving experience the Type 3 offered. The 1.6-liter engine's improvement over the 1500 was everywhere apparent — more pulling power at the bottom of the rev range, a more settled highway manner, a more confident relationship between throttle input and vehicle response. The fastback body's slightly lower center of gravity helped.

On the manual transmission, the Fastback rewarded spirited driving in a way the Squareback didn't quite manage. The gearbox snicked through ratios with satisfying precision. The steering was direct, the front torsion bars willing. You felt, driving a 1973 Fastback with commitment, that you were in a car that respected the act of driving.

The Fastback attracted a buyer who wanted more from a Volkswagen than pure utility — someone who had considered the Porsche 914 and found the price untenable, or who simply appreciated that the Fastback's roofline was doing something visually honest that a four-door sedan couldn't manage.

It was a car for the young professional who wouldn't have been caught dead in a muscle car, who thought of a car as a tool and wanted that tool to be finely made. In 1973, as gasoline disappeared from pump forecourts, they looked quite prescient.

The 1973 Fastback is increasingly collected, and with the vivid color options of that year, visually striking examples are not hard to imagine. Finding them is harder. The fastback body has its own rust susceptibilities: the rear hatch surround, the C-pillar areas, and the lower quarter panels are all candidates for close inspection.

Mechanically the car is identical to the 1973 Squareback in all important respects. Fuel-injected examples command collector premiums. The community of Type 3 specialists is active, the parts situation manageable. As with all late Type 3s, begin with the body and let the mechanics follow — the metal is the story.

The 1973 Type 3 Fastback made the strongest possible argument for its own existence in its last year: elegant, capable, frugal, and built to standards that have only grown more admirable with distance.

It did not win every argument in its time. It doesn't need to have. It simply needed to be right — and it was.