VW Golf 2.0 TDI: Driven

Harris drives recently crowned Car Of The Year and asks can a four-wheeled appliance appeal to true car nuts?

"Just buy a Golf." How many times have I said that?

Certainly hundreds: to strangers, friends, family and casual acquaintances. In my trade it is the stock answer to the question I always dread: what should I buy?

Bets don't get much safer, annoyingly

It's a dangerously simple way of looking at the wider carscape, but it has served as a kind of professional insurance policy for years now. It perfectly balances the conflicting pressures of expediency (normally I want to get the conversation over ASAP) and arse-covering. There are other answers - 320d, S-Max, Fiesta - but the Golf does the bulk of the work.

Smoke and mirrors
Through nothing more than expert engineering, brand positioning and marketing, the Golf has assumed an importance in the car world that completely belies the fact that it is, at heart, nothing more than a pretty unexciting hatchback. But if you need to take advantage of the fact that several million people actually have a need for just that kind of appliance, then the opportunities are almost limitless. You could even, were you so inclined, build the world's largest car empire on the back of it.

Yes, it really does fall easily to hand

The new Golf 2.0 TDI SE is an expensive machine. It costs £22,015 and it is not what anyone would call a generously specified car. No seat heaters, no leather, no sat-nav, no trinkets to speak of. The car I used for a week was fitted with parking sensors (£445), electrically folding mirrors (£95) and some metallic paint (£495). The result is a £23K hatchback that feels about as luxurious as a London Underground train carriage.

All very reasonable
But this is where the Golf is and always has been extremely clever, because it has always presented its sparseness as a simplicity that supplants something as a banal as mere luxury. Everything in the Golf appears to have been developed to destruction for decades; the cabin seems to offer everything you might want, but absolutely nothing more than you might need. And in the context of that price tag you very quickly find yourself reaching the strange conclusion that its very bareness contributes to the sensation that the price tag is actually perfectly fair.

Can mere transport still engage?

VW's achievment is nothing less than the recipe for Coca-Cola in a four-wheeled format.

No car invokes cliches more readily than the Golf. Describing it is a journalistic minefield because it really is all the car you could ever want. See? It's impossible to avoid them - they're magnetically attached to a machine whose controls do, with no sense of irony, fall easily to hand and whose torque could quite easily pull stumps from the ground.

Good enough
The Golf 2.0 TDI is a fast car. Not quite-a-fast-car, but one which in normal driving circumstances is comfortably faster than machines we called hot hatchbacks not many years ago. The 150hp means very little in this context; the 236lb ft of torque means everything. I was shocked at how rapidly it would cover ground on fast A- and B-roads: it surges along with all sorts of alarming numbers showing on the speedometer, the chassis calmly dealing with everything you throw at it. And then you sneak a look at the computer which reveals that it is still averaging over 40mpg. There are three 'driving' modes, in Sport the accelerator has a little button which clicks down like a kick-down for an auto 'box and the car seems to go even faster. I enjoyed that bit.

What, exactly, was wrong with the old way?

Electric power steering works better in lower powered cars with narrower tyres and through front wheel drive. This isn't enjoyable steering, but it's not bad and these modern hatches with fully independent rear ends can be fired into the most awkward turns, bumps and crests with complete reassurance that no strange camber or toe changes will occur. Like almost every car it feels slightly over-sprung for UK roads (the GT version must be very busy) but road noise from tyres and suspension is very well contained and the car is comfortable over long distances. Even five-up the driving characteristics don't alter much and you can squeeze three kids across the back seat in a way that makes me wonder if a small MPV is really necessary.

Single minded
There are so many other ways you could spend £23,000 it's hard to know where to begin the harsh deconstruction of VW's pricing policy, but after a week in the new Golf, I'm not sure there is an alternative. A Focus drives just as well but its cabin is an Atari-inspired nightmare. It also doesn't drive with the wonderful sparkle that those first-gen Focuses did back in 1998 - those really were exceptional cars.

Exciting or not you have to admire the focus

There are Kias and Hyundais that kill the Golf on price and specification - but they only serve to expose the great sea of snobbery that the Golf has expertly lived off for more than three decades. We know this is a flawless plan because it works when the Golf isn't an especially good car - the Mk3 was a dog, but people still wanted to own them.

The same snake oil that makes a sparse family hack somehow feel like a £23K proposition also renders the same car perfectly in its element when parked outside a stately home. The new Astra is a handsome machine so why would it look utterly preposterous under the same circumstances?

I suppose it just would, and that's all we'll ever understand on the matter.

Brand values
Would you pay more for the Golf over its rivals? I might, but then I'm not one of the many people who will buy a Golf without even considering another brand. Apart from the S-Class Mercedes, I'm not sure that's true of many other cars these days.

Hopefully room in the fleet for thrills too

There are a few chinks in the armour. The column stalks feel cheap, the harder plastics scuff too easily and the electric handbrake is designed to make you swear. The clutch is too sharp from take-off and I wish the front seats had a touch more support, but the rest of the package is so good at delivering what the majority of people want from a motor car that it's hard to find fault with it - especially the powertrain which shows that VW is close to making diesels sound like petrol-engined cars.

Is this the best car on sale in the UK? It might be. It appeals to such a broad range of people: those completely uninterested in driving, those uninterested in driving but interested in image and, most importantly, to people who love cars. Because it is so well engineered, the Golf appeals to car nerds. The mixture of impressive everyday performance and a 49mpg average is hard to ignore too.

This is a car I could see myself owning for ten years and 300,000 miles. The backbone of a fleet that would hopefully include dalliances with other interesting, occasional road and race cars.

Anyone else think the same?

VW GOLF SE 2.0 TDI
Engine: 1,968cc 4-cyl, turbo
Transmission: 6-speed manual/6-speed dual-clutch auto, front-wheel drive
Power (hp): 150@3,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 236@1,750rpm
0-62mph: 8.6sec
Top speed: 134mph (131mph)
Weight: 1,354kg (1,375kg)
MPG: 68.9mpg (62.8mpg) (NEDC combined)
CO2: 106g/km (119g/km)
Price: £22,015 (Five-door manual, before options)

Figures in brackets for DSG version.

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