km : Daily Driver

With a wealth of newer and fancier machines popping into our garage as of late, our venerable everyman’s performance car has, we hate to admit, sat on the back burner for a few weeks. That changed recently when the GTI was enlisted for vacation duty, covering an 1100-mile course through Illinois, Indiana, and a good chunk of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Naturally, the little black Volkswagen took the challenge in stride.

So why enlist the GTI for road trip duty? Let us count the reasons. Nine months into our time with the car, we’re still amazed by the sixth-generation GTI’s level of interior refinement, with pleasing materials to both look at and sit on while appreciating the lack of road and drivetrain noise. Nothing at this price point comes close. Still, this recent highway time has made us realize that the talkative Dunlop Direzza tires we paired to our aftermarket 19-inch wheels have a tendency to kill the mood just a bit.


Plus, there’s always the fuel economy factor. Our manual transmission GTI’s highway figure of 31 mpg might not be amazing for a small car, but it is far from disappointing. Over our week’s journey, mostly filled with highway mileage but also including some city action and a few spirited drives that got our fuel moving like it was coming from the bottom of the Gulf, we saw an average of around 28 mpg.

It was on those more involving segments of driving — most of them in Leelanau County, Lower Michigan’s most curvaceous — that we fell back in love with the GTI. It manages to make 200 hp seem impressive again in a 300-hp world. It makes handling a virtue in a stability control-reliant era. In essence, the GTI is proof that an old-school definition of a good car can still be not only relevant, but even dominant, in a world that has moved on. Still, it isn’t all old-timey. There’s the aforementioned lack of NVH, the fact that the suspension is firm without being painful, and the modern features like touch-screen navigation and corner-bending bi-xenon headlights.


In fact, everyone who has ridden along with us in our little black four-door seems to think it’s a more expensive car than it actually is. And that’s in a car that not only lacks leather seating, but is quite possibly fitted with cloth made from recycled kilts. From the outside, our bigger wheels that fill out their wells help the upscale case, but they don’t draw anywhere near as many comments as our new LED taillights, which happened to fall off of a truck in front of our office a few months ago. People just love those.

Just before departing for New Jersey’s Waterfest VW gathering, the GTI got a new exhaust system, courtesy of Borla. We’ll have more to report on that next time around, along with some new engine software and a different suspension setup.

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