Is the new Golf more than just a facelift?

Looking back, it was a fairly slow week in the car world. Although I was busier than ever getting all of the work together for major deadlines in University, it seemed like the outside world was revolving at a much slower pace. You can tell how slow it has been just by the fact that I am choosing to write about the Volkswagen Golf.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is an extremely important piece of news. The Golf is one of the best-sold cars worldwide and it is expected to sell brilliantly yet again, even after that ‘dieselgate’ issue… But about 6-8 weeks ago, when I first saw that there was a ‘new Golf’ coming, I got fairly excited as I expected a completely new car, but I am afraid it was my mind playing tricks on me. I had forgotten that the Mk7 was actually a completely new car, and I was just simply considering it the Mk6 facelift. So it was long due a slight redesign overall before the next generation should go on sale in a couple of years. Right in time for me to graduate from University too.

There have actually been quite a lot of changes to the Mk7 Golf now that it has been facelifted, although a lot of them are more than just appear on the surface. Over the whole of the car, it is clear to see what areas have been refreshed more than others. Lets keep it simple and start at the front of the vehicle and work backwards
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Very good colour choice too

The standard and GTi specs appear at a glance, to be much the same. The lower grilles have been stretched, the side vents have been made more aggressive and use more black plastic trims to widen the visual stance of the car. I am glad that they have kept the coloured pieces of trim running from the bottom edge of the grilles and through the headlights. The levels of details like this are exceptional and one of the reasons why they are such popular cars because they offer value of a car much more expensive. The complexity of the bumpers is very high but Volkswagen has managed to resolve each and every surface to a premium quality and it all just works very well.

 

I would like to also point out that the GTE version, the wacky all-electric model which I have experienced and loved, has been made to look more aggressive like the GTi, but is is still differentiable from the range by continuing the ‘C’ shaped light inside the black plastic trim pieces. 

See the similarities?…

For the ‘R’ trim, I think that the Volkswagen designers have been looking for too long at the Vauxhall refresh. There are so many aspects to the new front bumper that appeared to have been taken off the Astra that it is almost as bad as one of the Chinese clones. They do however manage to Germanify the design slightly, by including aspects of the more aggressive variants of the Golf, such as the R400’s extra carbon detailing, although I wouldn’t expect there to be any carbon for this price range.

Working our way back, the signature shut lines are obviously continued on. This being a facelift, no large surfaces or structures are changed, only the plastic bits and the front and back and the softer bit in the middle are touched.

The rear facelift is a lot simpler than the rest of the vehicles redesign. The designers have created more surfaces, basically just building on top of the smooth original shape. There is now a horizontal line running centrally through the badge on the boot, and a nice touch is that this line follows into the rear lights with a slightly clear finish. There is also another line, just below this one which sits above the bumper, but then joins the sharper edge which breaks up what would be quite a soft shape. Finally, the most work has been completed in the lower section of the bumper, with newly finished exhaust tips and a wider and more aggressive diffuser, which probably serves about as much use as sunglasses in Birmingham.

The biggest changes have been to the interior, with the addition of a large infotainment system. Gesture control is new to the Golf, which means you merely need to swipe your hands above the screen rather than having to go through the pain and effort of swiping.

Possibly quite a surprising change is that VW has instead upped the size of the engines when the rest of the world usually likes to downsize. The 1.5 TSI Evo is a completely new engine. The name denotes that it is turbocharged, which I expect is to make the engine more efficient. It also comes with ‘ACT’, or ‘Active Cylinder Management’, which in simple terms is cylinder deactivation and potentially also restricts the flow of fuel to again increase efficiency.

What we all know is that no matter how minor the changes are, this car will inevitably still sell well. Volkswagen took a big hit with dieselgate, but sales shouldn’t be too harshly affected for the newly facelifted Golf. Hopefully the next generation will be able to shrug off their more difficult recent past and further more, I hope that we see revolutionary design change that always manages to excite me.

I need more news in the car world, and more for me to give an opinion on. But fortunately, ‘The Grand Tour’ is finally getting released next week so I think I know what I will review then…

As always, thanks for reading and make sure you leave any comments in the description below! Also, follow me on all types of social media and I will see you the same time next week! 

All VW Golf Photos courtesy of https://www.netcarshow.com/volkswagen/2017-golf/

Vauxhall Astra – http://images.cdn.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/gallery_slide/public/vauxhall-astra-0001.jpg?itok=tBimsTZj