Obviously mine’s just the lower calorie Clubsport but much of the basics are the same.
Interior wise, I agree, the lack of buttons are a non issue. The steering wheel haptic pads I’m still not a fan of from a purely tactile viewpoint. A bit like moving to the iPhone 8 after having a proper home button on the previous generation phones, I didn’t ever take to that so continued with older phones until the button was no more.
The gear bean does make levers suddenly feel outmoded. However there’s still something nice about the manual interaction of a gear lever, be it manual or auto ‘box. Aesthetically the bean looks neater and once one is familiar with exactly where it is it does seem significantly quicker to engage drive and reverse when doing a three point turn or recovering from making a hash of reversing into a parking bay. Parking never was my strong point. Or for the purile, you can flick the bean quite rapidly once you no longer need to fish around for it, however there’s no getting away from the satisfaction of a knob in your hand.
Yeah, sorry…
Dash wise, I immediately gelled with the Bauhaus minimalism of the dash but the interior does feel marginally less plush than a mk7. I think the shades of grey might be the reason. It reminds me of moving from mk4 to mk5 Golf. The mk4 definitely felt more plush in its blackness but the greyness of the mk5 gave it a cheaper but more modern look. History repeating.
Externally the mk7 generation cars do still look better from most angles. I totally agree there. The mk8 has some bad angles and bulges. But it also has some sharpness when viewed from its best angles. Front and rear three quarter views of the mk8’s do look rakish.
The steering is definitely super sharp and precise but not overly pointy. One of the car’s best features along with the progressive brakes and almost lag free engine which are all slight steps up from the mk7(.5) and clearly where much of the development money was spent.
Obviously the rest of the unique 45 features I can’t comment on but they are definitely the icing on a damn fine cake.
Maybe a slight shame VW didn’t add glossy side skirts and bumper trim on the 45. The matte plastic standard GTI issue is practical in those road debris high impact areas but glossy would look a bit more special. There’s a brand new Golf eTSI parked not 50 feet away from my own GTI CS which has glossy mouldings and they do add a touch of class without being bulbous like 8R skirts.