Our Cars--Volkswagen GTI Mk. V

by Cookie the Dog's Owner on August 31, 2009

It's a quarter after seven on a late August morning. There's a light fog with the promise of a sunny day later. Tom Petty's "Refugee" is playing on the car stereo, and all is right with the world.

I brake the GTI to a stop at the intersection. There's no traffic coming from the left, and nothing but open two-lane road to the right.

Let's turn it loose.

Ease off the clutch, make the turn, and then hammer the gas pedal.

Yeah, but, it don't really matter to me, baby . . .

The turbo sings high harmony to the race-car melody coming from under the hood. We're up over five grand on the tach almost before I know it; clutch in, second gear.

Everybody has to fight to be free . . .

Up to third gear now.

You see you don't! Have!

Fourth gear. Yee-haw!

To live like a refugee!

At this point I'm howling along at a speed that's a bit north of prudent for this road, and there's some traffic ahead. Best exercise some restraint. Put it in sixth, back off the throttle, and let the speed bleed off.

(Don't have to live like a refugee)

Do I like my GTI? Oh, yeah. I like it. A lot.

As I've written in these pages before, my first true automotive love was my 1985 Honda Civic CRX. For most of my adult life, I've been trying to find a car that has a similar combination of efficiency, driving dynamics, solidity, personality, and just plain rightness--and maybe a few more horsepower. In the late summer of 2007, at the end of a complicated four-month cross-shop, I found a car that fit the bill--a GTI Mk. V. This was slightly ironic because back in the day I had originally wanted a GTI Mk. I, but just barely couldn't afford it.

The Mk. V GTI, introduced in the U.S. in the 2006 model year, is the hotted-up version of the fifth-generation Golf/Rabbit hatchback. It looks as if someone took the previous generation Golf (itself an evolution of Giorgetto Giugiaro's Mk. I) and ran it through the wind tunnel a few times. The basic Rabbit-y shape and styling cues are there, but everything is rounded off and raked back in the interests of cutting the drag coefficient. I like my cars a little more creased and folded, so the new shape took a bit of getting used to. The one major flaw I see in the styling is the blackout treatment of the bumper between the headlights, which combines with the black honeycomb grille to give it an Audiesque schnozz that really doesn't go with the rest of the car. (The new GTI Mk. VI has a redesigned front end that corrects this flub.) At some point, I may have the center of the bumper repainted gray to match the body.

Inside is a very spacious cabin rendered in super-dark near-black plastic, with brushed aluminum trim inserts. The cloth seats are upholstered in a plaid pattern lifted straight out of the Mk. I GTI. The seats themselves are comfortable and well-bolstered. Your humble narrator can fit his large self as comfortably in the back as in the front, and the trunk holds more than you'd expect. Fold the rear seat down, and the cargo capacity is prodigious. The build quality is excellent, and the car feels indestructably solid.

The layout of the driver's position is superb. The steering wheel has little bulges that make perfect handgrips, located at the classic "10-2 position" they taught you in driving school. The shifter, stereo, and other controls are conveniently located. The instrument panel is one of the nicest I've ever seen. It lacks a boost gauge, but makes up for it with a clever multifunction computer screen which displays instantaneous and average MPG readouts and a whole bunch of other data I've never accessed, warns you when you're running out of gas or window fluid or have low air in the tires, and even reminds you when it's time for scheduled maintenance. The only ergonomic complaint I have is that the wiper controls are a little quirky--you have to turn off the rear wiper in order to use the washer in the front.

The GTI is powered by a 1,984cc turbocharged, dual overhead cam, direct-injection four-cylinder engine. This engine produces 200 horsepower at 5,100-6,000 RPM, and 207 pounds of torque at 1,800-5,000 RPM. That nice wide power band means that the GTI has good pickup. Even when loping along in top gear, you've got maximum or near-maximum torque available at the flick of your right ankle. If there's any turbo lag, or any hesitation in the drive-by-wire throttle system, my senses aren't good enough to detect it.

My GTI has a six-speed transmission. The reviewers all say that the optional Direkt-Schalt-Getriebe twin-clutch automatic is the greatest thing in drivetrains since sliced bread, but I got the six-speed because (1) I wanted a traditional stick shift in the family for my sons to learn to drive on, (2) the DSG was another $1,200 or so that I didn't feel like spending, and (3) I like shifting my own gears. The manual tranny is a joy, with a smooth clutch that's easy for beginners to learn on. I do think six speeds is overengineering it a bit, though. Five would have been enough. I really haven't found much use for fifth gear apart from hypermiling in residential subdivisions. (25 MPH in fifth is about 1,200 RPM, good for 40-50 MPG on a flat road. Eat my dust, Prius!)

For those interested in acceleration--aren't we all?--VW claims a 0-60 time of 7.2 seconds for a GTI with this powertrain. The test results published in the buff books ranged from 6.1 to 6.5 seconds. Mid-sixes seems about right. There's more than enough power for freeway merges and other affairs of normal driving, and there's plenty in reserve for when you want to make your passengers go "Ooooh!" or embarrass the poseur Trans Am in the next lane.

When it comes time to reverse the process and bring the GTI to a stop, you have at your disposal the best brakes I've ever experienced. Press down on the pedal and the big red calipers stand athwart the laws of physics, commanding "Stop!" In car magazine road tests, the 70-0 braking distance is somewhere around 160 feet, which is darned impressive.

The steering is precise, with plenty of road feel--I didn't realize until I read the owner's manual that it's got power assist!--and there's no noticeable torque steer under acceleration. Lateral grip is somewhere around 0.85g, depending on which magazine did the testing. The stiff suspension means that you are aware of every bump, crack, and expansion joint in the pavement. It's not a rough ride, but not a soft one either--but this is a small price to pay for the GTI's driving dynamics.

Take the GTI down a squiggly back road, and it's a blast. The car is extremely agile and responsive for its 3,200 pounds. It stays flat in the corners and goes where you point it, and there's plenty of power for accelerating out of each bend. Various electronic stability nannies are watching over you, but they are unobtrusive in their ministrations. You just zip along the straights and toss it into the curves and sing along with "Refugee" or "Radar Love" at the top of your lungs and wonder why other cars can't do what this one does. You are further tempted toward hoonery by the GTI's personality, which is half uber-competent German engineer and half mischievous teen-rebel leprechaun. The GTI wants to play, and it can handle anything you throw at it.

I should say something about fuel economy. The EPA rates it at 21 MPG city, 29 highway, and 24 combined. I was trading in a Mercury Grand Marquis, and since the Mercury barely broke 20 MPG downhill with a tail wind, that would have been good enough for me. In actual daily use, I get between 28 and 29 MPG--even though a GTI is not designed with fuel efficiency as its primary objective and I'm not "driving green" by any means. According to the trip-average function on the car's computer, we got 33 MPG coming home from South Bend, a four-hour freeway run mostly in sixth gear at the speed of surrounding traffic. Had I cut my speed down by five or ten miles an hour and made a conscious effort to hypermile, I could have pushed that number higher. The GTI is so darned efficient that even if I were to drive around trying deliberately to make my carbon footprint as large as possible--mashing the gas pedal hard, upshifting late, laughing at speed limits, cackling "Die, polar bears! Die!" as I do my part for global warming--I would still get 25 MPG!

I know VW's reputation for fanatical German quality has been a bit tarnished in recent years, but so far my GTI has not let me down. I'm approaching the 50,000-mile scheduled maintenance as of this writing, and have had no mechanical failures. Zero, zip, nada, none. Two years after taking delivery, the car is still as tight and rattle-free as the day it left Wolfsburg.

Volkswagen had two series of commercials for the Mk. V GTI. The first encouraged you to "Make friends with your Fast," where the "Fast" is a small gremlin-like creature meant to symbolize your desire to drive the GTI flat-out.

VW even went so far with the gag as to mail me my very own Fast, identical to the one in the commercials, within a couple of weeks after I bought the GTI. The Fast came with a separate owners' manual, which is an absolute hoot to read.

The second series of commercials combined hip-hop style and German-engineered nerdness:

There seems to be an unwritten rule that GTI Mk. V owners have to wave to each other. I first noticed all the friendly waves I was getting about two or three weeks after I got the car. I'm not sure what it means, but I think it's an indication of just how happy a GTI can make you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go enjoy a little quality time with my Fast...and my dog.