Polo steals the show at Jwaneng Wine Experience
Gracing the Jwaneng Wine Experience on Saturday, the runt piglet of the Barloworld automotive exhibition stole the spotlight from its larger siblings and competitors. The 2022 face-lifted VW Polo packs big style into a compact, fuel-efficient city runabout.
While larger vehicles such as the VW Amarok, Ford Ranger, and Volvo XC-90 cast their enormous shadows over the tiny Polo, the era of ever-inflating fuel prices made the little German city car an extremely appealing offer.
With an exceptionally frugal fuel consumption rating of 5.6L/100km from its 45 litre tank, the new Polo can take one from Gaborone to Gantsi with plenty to spare, and when they do need to top up you can expect to pay a hair over P600 for a full tank.
With an upgrade of 5kW over the previous generation Polo, 152 kW 2-litre engine on the top of the line face-lifted Polo should whisk one away from 0-100km/h in roughly 6.5 seconds; a 0.2 second improvement over the last model.
However, power and performance are not the Polo’s forte despite its sprightly off the line pick up, according to VW AutoHouse sales executive, Brown Mogapi. Rather, the Polo is focused on being everything a Golf driver would need in a compact and affordable package.
“Beyond price, these cars (Polo and Golf) are running on essentially the same engine. The main difference is that the Polo is compact. With the Golf you get space, but still power.
The Polo is made to be a great run around car that can navigate the city and be easy on your wallet,” he said.
Mogapi further noted that the new Polo has prioritised safety within its compact form factor with VW’s Travel Assist as standard on all new Polos, bringing together lane keep assist, traffic sign recognition, autonomous auto-braking and adaptive cruise control. Beyond safety, Mogapi further added that the new Polo comes with a new design set to catch everyone’s attention. “We’ve introduced all new IQ.Light matrix LED lights on the front and back of the car which give a signature illumination that makes this car stand out.
Most prominently on the front of the car where the headlight LEDs stretch to the middle VW logo, which houses our integrated cruise control radar sensor.
The front light bar really stands out especially at night,” he said.
The exterior is not the only place that saw a major upgrade on the new Polo, the interior similarly got a tasteful refresh. “The interior now has more soft touch materials that are more pleasant to the touch and give the car a suitably more up market feel to go with the digital tech we’ve added in for this model,” Mogapi noted.
The new Polo has moved toward the trend of an all screen affair where most of the car’s controls are neatly packed away into either capacitive touch buttons or touch screens.
This is for better or worse, as some people have complained capacitive touch controls for features such as the aircon are cumbersome to use at best, and frustrating at worst.
Beyond this, the touch response for the screens are responsive and the menus are well laid out, albeit not to the standard leading automotive tech rivals such as Volvo. Thankfully the Polo comes with wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay to make it easier and more convenient to use the centre screen in the car.
The face-lifted Polo is available now at VW AutoHouse Gaborone in two engine variants, a 1.0-litre turbocharged three-cylinder, and a 2.0-litre equivalent model from P450,000.