Damien O’carroll.

New Golf doesn’t exactly respect the R-brand. But it’s a great smallcar all the same, says

It seems that a trendy thing to do among German car manufacturers is to take your respected and evocative performance brand and use it to sell dress-up kits on lesser cars.

All the cool kids are doing it. BMW slaps an ‘‘M’’ on anything with a body kit, Audi slathers a surreptitious ‘‘S’’ over many SUVS and hatches by way of its S-line stuff and Mercedes now tries to convince us a V6 from a normal production line is an AMG unit that deserves to sit alongside the hand-assembled powerplants.

The less cool kids always try to emulate their heroes, so Volkswagen also gives it a go by leveraging the iconic R badge: as seen on the Golf R32, Passat R36, the crazy Touareg R50 and the Polo R WRC rally car.

The ‘‘R-line’’ specification has been around for a while on a number of cars in the VW range, but now it would seem the company has decided to go even more blatant with the launch of the latest Golf R-line.

Topping the standard Golf range at $43,390 (not counting the GTI and R performance variants of course) the R-line cops most of the sexy exterior add-ons that the full-fat Golf R boasts (a body kit, rear spoiler, 18-inch alloys, trapezoidal exhausts, LED taillights), but instead of a firebreathing 220kw/400nm engine, the R-line just sticks with the same 110kw/250nm powerplant as the Golf Highline.

As well as the more aggressive exterior look, the R-line also gets sports suspension, sports seats, rear privacy glass, and shift paddles on the steering wheel – on top of the standard equipment of the Highline.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, VW shook up the smallhatch market by brutally hacking away at the Golf’s price and setting it up as the segment leader in terms of equipment and value for money. But it doesn’t quite have its own way any more.

The recently released and equally European Holden Astra is a massively good car that is both well-equipped and sharply priced,