The Volkswagen Golf won car of the year for 2015 from Motor Trend. What’s amazing about the Golf lineup for 2015/2016 is you have these vehicles that share a common platform but range from 84 horsepower and 118 foot pounds of torque up to 296 horsepower with 280 foot pounds of torque with prices ranging from 18K to 39K USD and possibly higher with the release of the Golf R Sportwagen next year. It’s a very versatile platform overall and, with the release of the Golf R 4xx (400/420) coming next year, you’ll have possibly the widest power gamut of any one family of cars and the highest horsepower output of any production 2-liter 4 cylinder engine on the market.
As an owner of a 2013 Golf R, I’ve been following the 7th generation Golf platform since the announcement 2 years ago. A few months after I bought my car, I knew a new Golf R was coming. Europeans received the car last year and USA received it this year but I held out. Why? I was holding out for nicer european style Pretoria wheels, a sunroof, auto-folding mirrors, LED Taillights and Apple Car Play integration. All of these were rumors for the 2016 North American model Golf R and all of those features were available to European R owners.
The 2015 model year was around 1,500 units for North America and the 2016 has arrived just this week and of the features I wanted, Apple CarPlay was the only addition along with some minor improvements to the interior but nothing substantial.
I’m glad I waited though. The waiting game helped me save more money for a down payment ($3,000) and I aggressively paid more double payments on my current car. The result is a trade-in of my current Golf with $4,500 in equity over blue book and a solid down payment.
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What’s better about the new Golf versus my current model? The amount of changes are truly staggering. At the performance end, we have an increase of 40 horsepower and about 40 foot pounds of torque along with limited slip differential and a more aggressive All Wheel Drive (Haldex system). The visual changes are simply too many to list but the car will arrive with 19” wheels, a better designed spoiler, new front and side look and larger brakes. The 4-tip quad exhaust is ridiculous but multiple tips are now cool so I can’t really do much about that. I’d love to re-route the exhaust to do a single center pipe at some point but exhaust work is expensive and yields no performance so it’s not high on my list.
The biggest improvement despite all of these performance changes is a 15-20% improvement in fuel economy. It means nearly $500 a year in fuel savings at today’s rate and my insurance premium dropped by $18 which was a nice surprise.
Interior improvements are what matter most to me. The infotainment setup is a 6.5” LED display from my current 4.5” setup. There’s support for live Traffic, VW Carnet, Apple CarPlay and the center info area between my tach and speedometer is full color LCD with many more features easily in view. Finally, I have an auto-dimming mirror at night! The wipers and headlights automatically enable without any driver interaction and small things like the side-mirrors pointing down when i put the car into reverse along with activation of a back up camera. The seats have more power adjustable functions and, most importantly, I am moving to a Dual-Clutch Gearbox (DSG) instead of manual.
I wrestled with the change to DSG (automatic) gearbox for a while but this is the future. DSG is faster at shifting, can handle far more horsepower if I modify the engine and increases the resale value. There are times in cities where I like having automatic and, for every other time, I have paddle shifters that are easy to use and shifting is quick.
The final change is Dynamic Chassis Control which allows driver selectable modes that make the car more agile, stiffer, quicker and louder. Comfort, Race and Sport modes will be a lot of fun. The DSG + DCC were extra costs.
An aside to the improvements is the built in navigation is now powered by TomTom Maps. I’ve wanted TomTom in my car for a long time and now, for the North American 2016 model year VWs, navigation is no longer powered by Navteq. Having the maps I help make in a car I drive is exciting and gives me a sense of pride just like every time I route home using an iPhone.
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The most important aspect of the upgrade for me is that I finally feel comfortable making improvements and changes to my Volkswagen. So much that I’ll be sharing updates here on the blog as a new section “My Car” is now a permanent category that I hope will be full of interesting content for car-lovers.
The MK6 Golf R was my introduction to Volkswagen, the community of drivers and the hardware components associated with the platform. I didn’t make any changes to the car but I did learn all about everything that can break and how much it cost.
Overall, the MK6 Golf R was incredibly reliable, great in snow, rain, dry roads. If there was a financial way to keep the MK6 R in a garage, I’d do it. It’s a car I’ll think fondly of for a very long time. Now that I’m into a new car, I have some planned changes that I’m taking up that are very cool starting with some cosmetic changes that I’ll share on this blog over the next few weeks.
This isn’t a review but I will post that soon. This is the intro to what I hope is a fun 5+ years with this amazing vehicle. I can’t wait to take you all on the journey.
I’ll take delivery today August 11th at 4PM. Here’s the car being unwrapped off of the delivery truck. Built in Wolfsburg and now in America:
