I can now announce that I've officially become one of the small band of people that have owned an example of each of the Performance Golfs (excluding the GTE which is an imposter at this point in time) and worse still all of them were in the same colour, and all manuals with pretty standard spec.
I "accidentally" became the owner of this a day or two ago:
The tough decision had been made to retire off the poor ol' GTD after seven long weeks of faithful service with it having amassed a mighty 500 miles. Its battle scars (one tiny stone chip on the front bumper) were lovingly touched in and it was gracefully put out to grass.
How did it all come about so soon you might ask? (well my wife certainly asked only not quite as delicately as that, it was more disbelief when I made the happy announcement to her when she got home from work a week and a half ago)
In a strange turn of events (which kind of sums up my life) we'd been invited over to see my nephew's new house. The irony of it all was he bought the house because when visiting us last year my wife had talked him into having a look round the show home on the estate which is just around the corner from me. He then bought an identical house to the show home several days afterwards having previously had no particular intentions of buying a new house just yet.
As my nephew lives 30 ish miles away from me I had a quick nose to see what interesting stock the local dealer had in thinking I'd combine the visit and hopefully they'd have a face-lifted Golf GTI/D/R in for me to have a gander at.
They happened to have in a Clubsport GTI and I got chatting to the salesman about it who was raving about it. I appreciate it's his job to rave about stuff he's selling but he was going a bit overboard. Out of curiosity I asked him about figures and he immediately got all defensive and said there were no deals to be had on Clubsports on orders of VW and that this particular car was going off to one of their other branches anyway. And that ended that conversation.
Being a curious sort of person I rang another dealer, 20 odd miles in the other direction as they had an almost identical car in for the same price. Again I was treated to instant raving about the car and again I put the question of figures to the salesperson.
This time my eyes opened a bit as I heard what I wasn't expecting to hear.
My GTD as bought with the £3250 VW discount as it was one of the very last off the line, on top of that I had a fair old dealer discount too and the thing cost me what seemed a bargain at the time for a new car coming in at under £22k. To put this into perspective and this is the reasoning I used when I bought it, a new three door mk5 Golf GTI with no nav, no foldy mirrors, no xenons, no 18" wheels, no gimmicky keyless entry etc cost a whisker under £20k when it was launched in 2004/5. Considering mine is a 5 door too which would take the price of the mk5 GTI up to just under £21k back then with little chance of much of a discount...
I bought the GTD thinking it would do me for a few years, it's a great car, it has the power exactly where you need it for day to day driving and returns good fuel economy too. I didn't use it much but when I did it was generally for longer journeys as I have another car for bombing around town and commuting most days.
I was quite happy with the GTD. I had a few mods for it (DTUK tuning box and PedalBox) and was looking at getting some new wheels for it just to put my stamp on it.
But alas, in a similar way that my nephew's visit turned into a house purchase, me visiting my nephew's new house ended up in me making a car purchase (even though it was at a different dealer).
To my surprise the dealer offered me back pretty much what I paid for the GTD and even knocked a bit of money off the Clubsport. So you could argue that I got back what I paid on my GTD plus a bit more, or argue it another way in that I got top book for my GTD and a tidyish discount on the Clubsport.
The Clubsport cost me a fair bit on top of the GTD obviously and it isn't even brand new, it seems all the Clubsports that were sat in showrooms were pre-registered before 1st April and generally it seems became the Sales Manager's company cars as during negotiations I phoned a few other dealers with similar cars as research to make sure I was getting a decent deal out of it all. Admittedly I could have picked up a slightly better deal by travelling a long distance but the dealer I bought the car from were excellent to deal with which counts for a fair bit in my book.
What's it like to drive? I'll quickly run through the previous mk7's I've owned to base my opinions on.
GTI PPI ordered one of the first GTIs which didn't end up as one of the first due to a six month wait for it. Never again I thought as by the time it arrived my enthusiasm had waned a bit thanks to how good my mk6 GTI still seemed.
The GTI was a 3 door in PW with nav and park assist plus rear camera as options.
I'd ordered a 3 door as in my eyes it looked a bit special and a white 3 door was what VW used in their advertising so I took it on good grounds that the arty advertising people knew a thing or two about what they were doing.
I'd fully expected to keep the PP for three years and that was the plan as I then expected the Edition 40 to be released which would be a likely next purchase.
The mk7 GTI PP was a very underrated car. I'm sure it put out more than 230bhp as standard as it went really well, was amazingly flexible and also had excellent fuel economy.
While I owned it I often questioned whether a GTD with a tuning box would be just as good, if not better but wondering about it was as far as it ever got. I thought the same thing when I had my mk6 too as the mk6 GTD was also a cracking car.
The VAQ diff was really good on fast bends although I found the car would still spin an inside wheel on some corners and the damping could be caught out at times.
The only criticism I have of that car was the fact it was a three door and the sliding seats weren't as good as on previous generations (either that or the seats were set further back so the door opening wasn't as good) and more importantly me being a short arse I had to twist to get the seatbelt which hurt my back. Worse still I have a narrow garage so getting in and out with the long doors became a massive headache and require yoga like moves. Young and flexible I ain't!
The Edition 40 broke cover in May 2015 after I'd had the GTI for 18 months or so and it has to be said I was initially unimpressed with the looks of the front bumper. The car was originally a Worthersee 'testing the water' model and it didn't really do it for me and the specs weren't set in stone at that point.
I happened to be having a chat with evo1986 who I'd bought my GTI from round about the same point in time. Lee is a great guy and I was questioning him on the mysterious changes that were the talk of the forum around about then concerning the sudden increase in the GTI and GTD list prices of about £900 but no immediate announcement on spec improvements. I'd messaged Lee to pick his brains on that and a few other things. Out of the blue a short time later Lee contacted me to say he'd had some R's come into stock that were cancelled lease orders. There were long delays on a lot of orders around that time so I guess people either got fed up waiting or got desperate for a car, especially if you urgently needed one as a company car.
So I bought an R...
5 door Golf RWhat can I say about the R? A fantastic all rounder and even harder to fault than the GTI PP.
Some criticise the looks as being not up to the performance but up close the car has that very Germanic styling of subdued intent. The devil is in the details.
Once a set of nice wheels with a better offset as added to fill the arches and a JB1 to fill the slight void in mid-range acceleration the R was just in a league of its own as far as fast Golfs go.
The only thing I can nit pick at really is it is almost too good so you have to be going stupidly quick to get any thrills. In everyday use you just marvel at how good as an all rounder it is and admire the beautiful dials and nice blue LED strips in the front doors. Yep, the only frills the R gives you is the dials and LEDs!
Fuel consumption? That's not its strong point but at the end of the day it's a 2.0 petrol that needs a big turbo to get big power. Big power needs bigger amounts of fuel and big turbos aren't renowned for being thrifty on the economy stakes, a simple fact of life.
The R went in the end due to a complete lack of use. Due to massive oversupply/popularity depending on your point of view the resale on them wasn't as good as it should be and when I sat there thinking about what it was losing a month being sat idle I once again remembered that something like a special edition Golf would be more suited to me as a die hard Golf owner. The fact it urgently required £600 spending on tyres as the 19" tyres I had on it I'd had on two mk6 GTI's and my mk7 previously too! I'd bought new wheels for each car but as I do a low mileage the tyres took ages and ages to wear down so I recycled the tyres and just sold the wheels on each time.
The maths did it for me in the end, £600 on tyres was money I'd never get back and the depreciation was about to hit winter lows so I spent several months agonising over it and in the end had a good offer from an independent dealership to take the R for top book price, complete with bald Contis, so I bit the bullet. And boy did it hurt.
The last car I'd regretted selling and genuinely felt bad about was my mk2 big bumper back in the mid-1990's. I sold that car on my birthday and couldn't even eat my birthday meal afterwards! I've had a lot of cars since that mk2 including other mk2's but I've treated each as a short term project - own, modify, enjoy, move on.
Ah well, we all make mistakes.
The GTD was a chance purchase. I was bored in work just before Xmas and flicked onto VW's website to have a nose. I saw the landing page on the website announcing £3250 off all Golfs and immediately underneath it was the wording about the service deal for PCP purchases. When you looked at it quickly it looked like the £3250 was a PCP offer to clear the last of the line stock so I didn't take much notice of it and just flicked around to see if there were any interesting used cars up for sale to kill a bit of time.
After a while I went back to the website landing page and re-read it.
Then I went to orangewheels website out of curiosity to see what it was all about. That's when in the small print where they tend to tell you that any PCP sweeteners don't count if you make a cash purchase. There was no mention of PCP. Yep, you could get a vanilla GTD (which you've got to admit is very well specced as standard) in three door for under £21k theoretically (if there were any build slots for one).
That brought about an immediate challenge for me - I wanted the cheapest 5 door GTI or GTD deal I could find out of the limited remaining build slots. If it was a straight cash buy it should have been pretty simple by I had a part ex to dispose of so I put the feelers out and strangely it was my local dealership that came up with the best deal on a GTD that was going to be one of the very last built.
So, a GTD at sub £22k (therefore minimal new car depreciation), just £20 a year to tax, 230ish BHP with a tuning box, nice looking as a standard car. Yep, I'll have some of that and so I did.
the GTDGreat car.
Can't fault it really, it has the power right where you need it in general driving, it looks good, it drinks little fuel, it has a good standard spec.
The one thing the GTD lacks is a sense of occasion.
You can get half way there with a bit of tuning for a raw edge to the driving and some nice low cost mods like sootchucker has done to give it more personality.
Technically I could have happily lived with that car for a good few years but alas the show home thing came to haunt me and I ended up with the VW equivalent of a show home.
Continued below due to maximum post character amount being exceeded after several hours of hard typing....
