Volkswagen
Among the 315 Volkswagen entries in the MotorJury library, the Volkswagen Bora holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1999. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Volkswagen Bora properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Škoda Auto Škoda Fabia, the SEAT SEAT León, the Toyota Toyota Yaris — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Volkswagen Bora reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.4 L I4 16V (petrol) / 1.6 L SR I4 8V (petrol) / 1.6 L I4 8V (petrol) / 1.6 L I4 16-valve (petrol) / 1.6 L FSi I4 (Petrol) / 1.8 L I4 20-valve (petrol) / 1.8 L I4 20-valve turbo (; kerb weight is recorded at designer = Hartmut Warkuß / Freeman Thomas / J Mays; drive goes through 5-speed manual (02J) / 6-speed manual (02M) / 4-speed automatic (01M) / 5-speed automatic Tiptronic (09A) / 6-speed automatic (09G); the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Volkswagen's own catalogue the Volkswagen Bora sits alongside the Volkswagen Apollo, the Volkswagen Routan, the Kübelwagen, the MPV Tehran. The record names the Volkswagen Vento (A3) / Volkswagen Citi Golf (China) as its predecessor and the Volkswagen Jetta (A5) / Volkswagen Bora (second generation) (China) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Hartmut Warkuß / Freeman Thomas / J Mays. Assembly is recorded at Germany: Wolfsburg / Poland: Poznań / Slovakia: Bratislava / South Africa: Uitenhage.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Volkswagen Bora was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.