21st Century Golf

You won’t need to be told what you’re looking at on first acquaintance.

The Golf shape is too ingrained in the collective consciousness to be fiddled with too much, but that’s not to say it looks the same: it sits more squarely on the road, has a more purposeful stance and the front end shares the new family look first seen on the Scirocco. It is as handsome and well-proportioned as ever, and a design as slick as this manages the difficult task of appealing to many without offending a single soul. Conservative yes, but also undeniably handsome and well proportioned too.

There are greater changes on the inside however. The cabin is decked out in new materials, with a redesigned dashboard and major controls. The first thing you notice is the new dials, handsomely lit in white, while the centre console carries the latest Volkswagen media screen – easy to use and understand with clear graphics and quality buttons. The climate controls feel good too, and the steering wheel is chunky and good to hold. It’s no surprise to see that the effort has been put in on the areas that get the most contact.

Even though the plastics are not quite so soft lower down in the cabin, the way the Golf is put together is reassuring. When you slam the door, press a button or squeeze the handbrake, you can sense the hours of discussion and toil spent by engineers in white coats fussing over the slightest detail – at least that’s the impression you get, and to deliver that in a car which is designed to have such a broad appeal is certainly no bad thing.

Volkswagen has made plenty of claims about improvements in refinement too, and the first 50 yards behind the wheel back them up. The last generation Golf was hardly uncomfortable, but the new Golf is quieter still, with a high level of noise insulation. It’s only at speeds above 60mph that you start to hear a faint whistle of wind noise, or should you decide to push the engine to its limits. The petrol options are as quiet as ever, but even the 2.0-litre common rail TDI unit is quiet at start up where the old one would definitely make its presence felt.

On the move you can hear it’s diesel, but only because it doesn’t sound like a petrol, not because there’s any clatter or clonk. This is certainly the most refined diesel in this segment, which makes it even harder to consider the alternative powerplants. With 137bhp on offer backed up by a very healthy 236lb/ft of torque, there’s never a shortage of go, and you can press on in a very effective fashion by exploiting the engine’s flexibility.

This is improved still further should you choose the DSG gearbox, which creates a virtually seamless flow of acceleration as it shifts through each of its six gears – whether that’s automatically or via the paddles behind the wheel. It’s a superb transmission, and signals the end of a conventional automatic on the Golf: why would you want anything else?