Is this the best car in the real world?
The new VW Polo GTI is a sensible choice that will never fail to make you smile, writes David Linklater.
The most common question motoring writers get asked is ‘‘what’s the best car you’ve driven?’’. Which is impossible to answer because different cars do different things.
For example, a city car should be easy to drive and park, a family car should be great value and well-packaged, a luxury car should be well-equipped and beautifully made, a performance car should extract every ounce of acceleration out of the powertrain and a sports car should be accomplished in the corners.
A car that’s extremely good at one of those things has to trade off talents in other areas to various degrees. It’s called opportunity cost.
But if there was a car that was a high achiever in virtually every area and beautifully balanced in the sense that one talent wasn’t at great expense to any of the others, then that might just be the best car in the real world.
That car might be the Volkswagen Polo GTI.
Any Polo is very easy to drive, with a proven two-pedal transmission and supermini-sized exterior dimensions (it’s just a snip over 4 metres long).
But the Polo is also a fine family car. It’s actually wider, with a longer wheelbase and much bigger boot than the Golf IV of the early 2000s (in fact, the boot is only 10 per cent smaller than the current Golf’s).
Impressive interior build quality and materials is a VW thing. There’s soft stuff and shiny stuff and Polo really does give the impression of aiming well above its station in life.
This particular Polo also has swish stuff like LED lights, multifunction steering wheel, ambient interior lighting, a large eight-inch (and very shiny) touch screen and a full suite of active and passive safety features, including pedestrian monitoring and driver fatigue detection.
All that’s really missing is active cruise control and you can add that for $1000.
Now comes the fun (performance and sporting) bits, because this is really the first Polo GTI that VW has taken seriously as a standalone model. The last version was a fun little car but also a bit of a parts-bin special, with an older-generation 1.8-litre turbo engine under the bonnet.
The new Polo GTI picks up the 2.0-litre turbo engine from the Golf GTI, albeit in a slightly lower state of tune: 147kW/320Nm compared with 169kW/350Nm.
It’s therefore slightly slower to 100kmh (by 0.3sec) and that’s entirely by design. Because VW has to keep the more expensive Golf at the top of the pecking order.
But the Polo GTI’s performance is still a hoot and if you wind the drive-mode selector up to Sport you get the the pops and bangs you expect from a dual-clutch VW.
That’s the genius of the DSG transmission: it can be a mildmannered automatic in town, but change cogs like you’re on a track day when you want it to.
No, the Polo GTI doesn’t handle like a pure sports car. For a start, it’s a front-wheel drive hatchback and more to the point, it’s quite heavy. There’s less than 50 kilograms between this and the Golf GTI.
But if you accept that hot hatches are sporty (and I’d like to hear the argument against it), then you’ll love this Polo GTI. It’s grippy and the front end is fitted with VW’s XDS electronic differential lock, which helps you to deploy maximum power accelerating out of corners.
The GTI also gets Sports Select suspension (optional in Europe) as standard in New Zealand. It’s not fully adaptive like the Golf’s Dynamic Chassis Control, but rather a two-mode thing.
It goes into its firmest setting in sync with Sport on the drive mode selector, but there’s also an Individual setting where you can mix-and-match powertrain and suspension.
It’s mature enough to feel quite composed in quick driving, but hasn’t lost the cheeky edge you expect of a car like this.
The Polo GTI is far from a perfect car. It might look a little too low key for some, it’s a tad weighty and it’s true that the ride and handling doesn’t have the sophistication of the Golf GTI. But then the Polo GTi is more than $10k cheaper than its Golf sibling. And while $38,490 might seem like a lot for a small hatchback, it’s actually a bargain for a city/ family/luxury/performance/ sports model that might just be the best car in the real world.
Plus its sports seats are trimmed in tartan fabric (VW calls it ‘‘Clark’’, presumably after Jim), which is of course a nod to the original 1974 Golf GTI but also the greatest feature ever fitted to a production vehicle.