A curious activity emerged at the Frankfurt motor show in 1997. People would sit in a certain freshly revealed model, look up at its ceiling, grasp a grab handle, pull it and let go. 

They would then watch it return to its resting position not with a firm, plasticky thump but a slow-motion, silent glide skywards. And then they would do it again, fascinated. 

The car was the Mk4 Volkswagen Golf. Never before had an automotive grab handle generated so much chatter among motoring hacks and industry analysts, although the extravagantly swooping ‘Jesus Christ’ panic handle of the 1966 Lamborghini Miura must have come close.

There was something oddly mesmerising about this soft-return feature: tugging it was as irresistible as playing with the damped-closing drawers found in a kitchen showroom. Although this sounds absurd, there was symbolism in it too. 

This one trivial feature encapsulated a sudden and seismic shift in the motoring world. Quality was coming to the common man’s car cabin. This was a new kind of quality, an indulgent quality that transcended 4mm panel gaps, squeak-free interiors and engines that started every morning.

This was the quality of a Mercedes meeting the world’s workaday car, the world’s biggest-selling model presenting its occupants with dashboards that sounded reassuringly dense when tapped and whose matt, textured surface would squash just a little under the pressure of a firmly driven index finger. 

Volkswagen’s classy grab handles and tactile dashboards certainly wrong-footed Ford. The Blue Ovalists had judged almost everything to perfection when conceiving the hot new 1998 Focus, but what that deeply considered Ford family car didn’t have was a soft-feel, expensively grained dashboard. 

Although the Focus was still a year away from appearing, it was too late to change anything this major – or even add damped-action grab handles. 

The Golf did without the ingenious sophistication of the Focus’s ‘Control Blade’ rear suspension and its radical styling, but it propelled the standards of family hatch interiors to a new and expensive level. 

And it wasn’t just grab handles and grains: the Golf’s instruments were lit in a classy blue hue, its interior door handles were chromed metal rather than plastic and its switchgear shifted with a soft positivity that oozed engineering expense.