2014 Volkswagen Golf / GTI Mutiny on the high fees.
It doesn’t matter
whether our German brothers dub it a Golf or a Rabbit or a pine marten.
What we have here, folks, is a winner with momentum. This is the eighth
consecutive year that the VW Golf lineup, the lone GTI, or both have
earned 10Best laurels. What Belushi and Aykroyd did for rumpled black
suits, Volkswagen has done for hatchbacks.
Even
the starter-kit five-door Golf automatic is a piquant stew of
near-flawless fundamentals, and you can slide your cheeks into one for
as little as $20,815. The TDI turbo-diesel is the Earth Firster’s happy
hummer, a torque weasel that will make you feel marginally less guilty
about climate change. With a manual shifter, a TDI five-door starts at
$26,020. Both of these Golfs are gratifyingly balanced and composed if
very different in acceleration. Their cabins are swathed in uplevel
materials and pleasing surfaces. The unibody is a Mason jar of airtight
rigidity. The suspension is unflustered by scabrous pavement. The
steering’s effort builds naturally off-center. And the IP is dedicated
to the serious minded.
As
we’ve said several times before, the Golf remains an unlikely
partnership of practicality and refinement. Rarely do economy cars so
fervently reward precise inputs. Rarely has an econohatch been hobbled
by so few compromises.
Of
course, it’s the driver-focused GTI that is the wolf in Wolfsburg’s
clothing. You can own a five-door manual Wolfsburg Edition GTI for only
$25,915. This little comet still defines the hot-hatch class it created
way back in 1976, and it still begs to be booted around like a hacky
sack. The damper calibrations feel like the outcome of engineers who
really care, with roll gorgeously controlled, yet the ride remains
creamy and the brakes don’t fade.
The
taut GTI glides to fame with one of automobiledom’s all-star
drivelines: VW’s 200-hp, rev-happy, turbocharged 2.0-liter
inline-four—with its delightful punch of midrange torque—mated to the
optional paddle-shift dual-clutch DSG automatic ($1100). Never has plaid
felt so fashionable or more happily been hustled. Drive it to the Home
Depot on Saturday morning; enter an SCCA autocross at noon. How unlikely
is it for a car this basic to feel so sophisticated, so mature, as if
hatched in Munich or Ingolstadt? One C/D editor noted, “The GTI
pours itself down the road, a fluid stream of disciplined control.”
Okay, so that’s not exactly Faulkner, but we’re trying.
The
GTI is not without pimples, of course. We still wish its clutch and
brake pedals telegraphed slightly more info up the driver’s leg. On dry
days with unlimited downrange visibility, we’d like to disable the
traction control—completely. If it were up to us, we’d redact a
smidgen of the existing understeer, and we’d also undertake all of our
GTI motoring exclusively on summer tires, right until the moment that
two snowflakes coalesce above.
It’s
amazing that this sixth-gen Golf landed on 10Best again, because it’s
what we call “almost over, not yet out.” The seventh-gen Golf—riding on
the so-called MQB platform—will arrive this spring. It will be lighter,
stronger, and longer by 2.2 inches, and in GTI spec, its engine should
be at least 10 horses healthier. Note also that it will be assembled in
Mexico for the first time since the third-gen cars. We’ve already
sampled Euro-spec versions. They again seem likely to become the canny
gray wolf that somehow gets dropped into a box of Labrador puppies—big
toothsome bites of fun in a scary-good way. (That’s not Faulkner,
either. More like the Columbus Zoo’s Jack Hanna.)