Volkswagen Golf - 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.

It’s amazing that this sixth-gen Golf landed on 10Best again

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 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.

The taut GTI glides to fame with one of automobile-dom’s all-star drivelines

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 out-come 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 automobile-dom’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 steering’s effort builds naturally off-center

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 snow-flakes coalesce above.

The damper calibrations feel like the out-come of engineers who really care, with roll gorgeously controlled

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.)