Golf 1.4 TSI 150 GT DSG

[acme]

LocoBlade said:

I''d agree, you need to press further for a similar amount of throttle, all in a bid to reduce fuel, which I'm not convinced it does. I wouldn't want to use sport all the time as it amends the gearing too, you're constantly aware the engine is revving harder, in part defeating the most impressive part of the car in my eyes, it's extreme smoothness.

[LocoBlade]

Obviously that's only applicable to DSG where it presumably holds a lower gear by default. JackReachers is manual so the sport mode cant affect the gearbox, just throttle and steering

acme said:

LocoBlade said:

I''d agree, you need to press further for a similar amount of throttle, all in a bid to reduce fuel, which I'm not convinced it does. I wouldn't want to use sport all the time as it amends the gearing too, you're constantly aware the engine is revving harder, in part defeating the most impressive part of the car in my eyes, it's extreme smoothness.

[acme]

LocoBlade said:

Absolutely, if only in the modes the gearing & throttle were separated but there's only three choices per profile; steering/engine/ACC, is it the same in the Leon? I think the GTI has more?

It's not a definitive conclusion, and whilst for the mileage I do and the roads I have to drive on for company business means the DSG is the best decision for me, I think if I did less than 10k per annum I'd go for the manual. The DSG definitely robs you of a level of interaction with the car and detaches you even in a mainstream vehicle like this. For me it proves that I can't understand those who prefer a non-manual in a proper sports car, fine if you've got a 991 you use everyday, but not a weekend toy.

[JackReacher]

Well I checked the manual and the menus in the system, Eco reduces throttle response, tames the climate control and lowers the point at which it recommends changing up a gear. Sport firms up the steering and throttle response from Normal. Haven't tried each setting out properly yet.

[acme]

JackReacher said:

Well I checked the manual and the menus in the system, Eco reduces throttle response, tames the climate control and lowers the point at which it recommends changing up a gear. Sport firms up the steering and throttle response from Normal. Haven't tried each setting out properly yet.

Let me know how you get on, on the Golf at least it's an interesting experience.

[toml555]

Picked up one of these a couple of weeks ago to replace my 2007 Audi A4 Avant 2.0T Quattro SE.

Absolutely loving it so far and returning about 46mpg overall. I've found it best with steering and engine in 'Normal' and ACC in 'Eco'. DSG and ACC is incredible on dual carriageways and motorways!

Edited by toml555 on Sunday 16th November 22:07

[va1o]

Lovely looking spec that

[toml555]

Cheers - it's a completely standard GT with DSG and Deep Black pearlescent paint. The paint looks incredible when clean and polished, but I live in the countryside so that's going to be a rare occurrence.

If I'd had a choice I'd have specced climatronic and a grey/silver metallic, but this was a group stock end-of-month bargain so ho-hum!

[toml555]

Cheers - it's a completely standard GT with DSG and Deep Black pearlescent paint. The paint looks incredible when clean and polished, but I live in the countryside so that's going to be a rare occurrence.

If I'd had a choice I'd have specced climatronic and a grey/silver metallic, but this was a group stock end-of-month bargain so ho-hum!

[JackReacher]

Nice golf, I have to say I didn't really like the look of the Mk7 when it came out, but it's certainly growing on me, especially the GT, GTD and GTI models.

For those of you who have had their cars a while now, do you find it uses any oil at all? I know VAG 1.4's have had their issues previously so and I will be checking mine weekly as it gets run in as a precaution.

[LeoSayer]

JackReacher said:

For those of you who have had their cars a while now, do you find it uses any oil at all? I know VAG 1.4's have had their issues previously so and I will be checking mine weekly as it gets run in as a precaution.

I put some oil in my 1.4 COD for the first time last weekend as it was getting towards the bottom of the hashed area on the dispstick.

Half a litre after 6,500 miles after 7 months.

[acme]

toml555 said:

Cheers - it's a completely standard GT with DSG and Deep Black pearlescent paint. The paint looks incredible when clean and polished, but I live in the countryside so that's going to be a rare occurrence.

If I'd had a choice I'd have specced climatronic and a grey/silver metallic, but this was a group stock end-of-month bargain so ho-hum!

I'd agree about it being best in individual mode with a set up of steering & engine in normal and ACC in Eco - for me normal ACC is too abrupt, if you pull out to overtake a car on dual carriageways & motorways it accelerates too quickly & not smoothly as you would try to do do yourself.

How do you find throttle response, I find there's considerable lag even in normal & even worse in Eco, sport holds gears to much? I can't work out if it's due to the car being turbo charged or just the car - I test drove others & they seemed to do it too.

Also intrigued what you got yours for, not that it matters in the sense that mines a company car. They seem to be very rare, I've only seen one other in 7 weeks/4kmiles - then again I guess 25.5k (incl metallic) retail is a lot for a Golf, especially as many will think it's a weedy engine as it's only a 1.4 - how wrong they are!

I'm getting about 45mpg (OBC) over 4k miles in 7 weeks, inevitably I spend a lot of time on the motorway with ACC set at 70-75, so it's not as good as I'd hoped. According to my spreadsheet based on brim to brim 43.3mpg is the true figure - Honest John's was right!

[74merc]

45mpg is pretty good. Not sure if the same applies to a petrol engine, but my wife's 2.0TDi took about 15K miles for the engine to loosen up. mpg increased by about 5mpg thereafter.

[toml555]

acme said:

How do you find throttle response, I find there's considerable lag even in normal & even worse in Eco, sport holds gears to much? I can't work out if it's due to the car being turbo charged or just the car - I test drove others & they seemed to do it too.

Also intrigued what you got yours for, not that it matters in the sense that mines a company car. They seem to be very rare, I've only seen one other in 7 weeks/4kmiles - then again I guess 25.5k (incl metallic) retail is a lot for a Golf, especially as many will think it's a weedy engine as it's only a 1.4 - how wrong they are!

Throttle response in Eco is fairly none-existent and Sport holds the gears a bit long. Completely agree. I find Normal OK though.

The only thing that I've found annoying is losing the power steering when the start/stop kicks in whilst you're momentarily waiting at a junction with some lock on ready to turn.

Actually, that's not true. I also find it annoying that you have to flick the mirror knob to 'left' or 'right' to get it to dip when reversing. I'd prefer it just dipped both a little bit every time you engaged reverse gear. Minor quibble.

I paid around £22.5k including 3yrs servicing and 3yrs GAP. In itself not a great deal, but I took into consideration the fact that they offered me £1500 over what I was prepared to accept in px value for my old Audi.

I stuck 36.5psi in all 4 tyres on the weekend and drove from Winchester to North London at an average of 58mph. Managed 51.2mpg. Not too shabby.

[acme]

74merc said:

45mpg is pretty good. Not sure if the same applies to a petrol engine, but my wife's 2.0TDi took about 15K miles for the engine to loosen up. mpg increased by about 5mpg thereafter.

I should've caveated that although it's not as good as I'd perhaps hoped the engine is so smooth, & it's such a relaxing car for what I do that a little less MPG isn't really an issue, nor is spending more timing filling up - it'll get 450miles on a tank, roughly 100 less than my old A3 1.6TDI got.

I think it's a terrific car and for me at least it was the right decision I had company car wise vs Golf 2.0TDI GT or 120D.

[JackReacher]

acme said:

I should've caveated that although it's not as good as I'd perhaps hoped the engine is so smooth, & it's such a relaxing car for what I do that a little less MPG isn't really an issue, nor is spending more timing filling up - it'll get 450miles on a tank, roughly 100 less than my old A3 1.6TDI got.

I think it's a terrific car and for me at least it was the right decision I had company car wise vs Golf 2.0TDI GT or 120D.

I think we are on course to get 450/460 miles from the first full tank we've put in, which would work out at about 46mpg I think. Happy enough with that but still hoping to average 50 once it's run in properly. We came from an Audi A1 1.6 Tdi, with smaller 40 litre tank compared to 45 litres in the Leon, and that used to get around 500 miles from a tank. The reality of that is that we will probably get a day's less commute out of each tank than the A1, but like you say it's much quieter/smoother engine. One thing we have noticed is that the mpg does start to plummet as soon as you get into traffic, more so than a diesel.

I also debated long and hard about getting a 2.0 Tdi FR instead, but worked out from a cost point of view that providing the 1.4 got at least 45mpg, the petrol would be cheaper to run. So far so good then but still early days.

Coming from a 1.6Tdi, the 1.4ACT feels good performance wise due to similar torque levels, but if you were coming from a 2.0Tdi the 1.4 would initially feel a bit weedy.

[acme]

toml555 said:

Throttle response in Eco is fairly none-existent and Sport holds the gears a bit long. Completely agree. I find Normal OK though.

The only thing that I've found annoying is losing the power steering when the start/stop kicks in whilst you're momentarily waiting at a junction with some lock on ready to turn.

Actually, that's not true. I also find it annoying that you have to flick the mirror knob to 'left' or 'right' to get it to dip when reversing. I'd prefer it just dipped both a little bit every time you engaged reverse gear. Minor quibble.

I paid around £22.5k including 3yrs servicing and 3yrs GAP. In itself not a great deal, but I took into consideration the fact that they offered me £1500 over what I was prepared to accept in px value for my old Audi.

I stuck 36.5psi in all 4 tyres on the weekend and drove from Winchester to North London at an average of 58mph. Managed 51.2mpg. Not too shabby.

Thanks for the response, these cars seem fairly rare so getting feedback isn't that easy. Interesting how you feel about 'normal' mode, here's a piece of Autocar's test, this is exactly how I feel;

It’s clear of notable lag but, as you move from off to part-throttle, our test car had an occasional hesitation in response. It was hard to know what it was: it felt almost like a traction control system intervening for a nanosecond, but clearly wasn’t. It could have been the cylinder deactivation kicking in or out, but it’s impossible to know for sure. A small foible, but noticeable nonetheless.

It's all personal I guess. Incidentally I've not noticed the power steering issue - the soft start/stop is great as compared to my old As 1.6TDI!

Re the mirror auto dipping, you can set it up, see p134 in the manual, I think you can set it to the amount you want.

I won't bore you with why, but when test driving these (even though it's a company car), that seemed about as good as I could get, the difference between dealers even close to one another was considerable.

That is good, the most I've managed is 49mpg on the OBC, I've seen 52/53 during the journey but not til the end. If you got an average of 58 mph what were you sitting at, and with ACC? - I suspect it would be more efficient without ACC, but it's such a great feature I use it all the time.

[acme]

JackReacher said:

I think we are on course to get 450/460 miles from the first full tank we've put in, which would work out at about 46mpg I think. Happy enough with that but still hoping to average 50 once it's run in properly. We came from an Audi A1 1.6 Tdi, with smaller 40 litre tank compared to 45 litres in the Leon, and that used to get around 500 miles from a tank. The reality of that is that we will probably get a day's less commute out of each tank than the A1, but like you say it's much quieter/smoother engine. One thing we have noticed is that the mpg does start to plummet as soon as you get into traffic, more so than a diesel.

I also debated long and hard about getting a 2.0 Tdi FR instead, but worked out from a cost point of view that providing the 1.4 got at least 45mpg, the petrol would be cheaper to run. So far so good then but still early days.

Coming from a 1.6Tdi, the 1.4ACT feels good performance wise due to similar torque levels, but if you were coming from a 2.0Tdi the 1.4 would initially feel a bit weedy.

Got to say I've not noticed any difference in the past 4k miles for MPG, though perhaps might get better at 5 or even 10k plus? MPG does indeed reduce in traffic, plus it often takes 40+ miles to get into 43/44+ MPG on the OBC, they're not as efficient as diesels, but I'm happy.

Last private car was a Golf 2.0TDI (140bhp 236lb/ft) and I'd agree, though the MK7 is a lot quicker, the extra torque (MK7 185lb/ft) would make it seem 'weedier', but compared to it's direct predecessor the A3 1.6TDI it's a lot quicker and smoother.

[JackReacher]

acme said:

these cars seem fairly rare so getting feedback isn't that easy.

"
Yes not very common in any format it seems. I don't know how accurate the data is on the "howmanyleft" website, but that seems to indicate that there are about 3,500 Golf GT's with the ACT engine, compared to about 13,700 diesel GT's. I suspect the A3 would sell in a similar ratio.

I hardly ever see a Polo bluemotion GT with this engine, and it's only recently been added to the A1, Leon and Ibiza. It seems odd given that the petrol would be cheaper to run for most people, even me doing 20k miles a year!

I don't know if lower numbers will be good longer term for residuals, probably depends on how reliable the engine turns out to be and if people realise how good these engines are from a performance/economy point of view.

[markc123]

JackReacher said:

"
Yes not very common in any format it seems. I don't know how accurate the data is on the "howmanyleft" website, but that seems to indicate that there are about 3,500 Golf GT's with the ACT engine, compared to about 13,700 diesel GT's. I suspect the A3 would sell in a similar ratio.

I hardly ever see a Polo bluemotion GT with this engine, and it's only recently been added to the A1, Leon and Ibiza.

My new Blue GT Polo has passed the factory build stage, so I'll hopefully have some pics and feedback in about 3 weeks. Looking forward to a modern car with a warranty and fuel economy the right side of 30 :-) (E46 330Ci currently).