km : Daily Driver

In the earlier days of Kilometer, just as we were coming down from a few stressful weeks around its launch, we were delighted to take delivery of one very handy stress relief tool. Our long-term 2010 Volkswagen GTI was rolled off a truck and into our hearts, where five previous generations of VW’s hot hatch also reside. It promises to be even more entertaining to drive than the Mk5 GTI, but with looks we can instantly warm up to.

A few months in, we’re still quite happy with how we filled out the spec sheet. Metallic black paint, 18-inch wheels, and xenon headlamps were among our exterior options, while inside we just picked a few essentials — standard plaid “Jacky” cloth, six-speed manual trans, base touch-screen multimedia screen, but with the Dynaudio 300-watt system and a moonroof. We also added rear side airbags for just $350 extra, driving our car’s final price up to $28,115.



So far, the GTI has lived up to expectations, with materials and build quality on par with anything wearing a propeller, a star, or a collection of rings on the hood. We’ve covered just about 2000 miles thus far, including a highway trip to Detroit and back. The car’s happy to settle in at 80 mph and road noise at that speed is surprisingly low, thanks in part to some generational changes in the 2.0-liter turbo that have reduced NVH levels to almost zero. Our first few tanks of fuel have generally reflected the EPA’s 21/31 rating, as the majority of its miles have been logged on short suburban commutes.

If we really go hunting for complaints about the latest GTI, we’d have to say that it could be a touch quicker. But if that were fixed, we’d probably talk about terrible torque steer, or how it isn’t fun to drive slow, or how it needs a true limited-slip differential. We’ll be able to say that for sure soon, though, because power upgrades are part of the near-term plan. A Borla cat-back exhaust kit is also waiting to go on the car, but we need to get it to our local dyno shop first to give you all a stock baseline first. Stay tuned for that.



Elsewhere on the upgrade front, we knew going into the project that we were already tired of VW’s “Detroit” wheels, also known as “Huffs.” That’s why we had a set of Velocity Motoring’s V710-style 19-inch wheels waiting in the garage, wrapped in Dunlop Direzza DZ101 rubber. We’ve been happy with the look and the performance of the tires, but with our first snowfall earlier this week, the stock setup went back on. Not that the ContiSport 2s are any better on the slippery stuff., which is why we have a set of proper snow tires on the way.

Despite a sea of praise that’s been spoken about the 2010 GTI since ours arrived, one component on the car has shown itself as a letdown. The new standard touch-screen multimedia system looks nice and works well overall, but the iPod integration could use some work. The system is slow to process selections, so there’s some delay when trying to select a particular song, or in scrolling down a long list of artists on one’s iPod. Sometimes the display gets confused, too, displaying a song title that’s one track behind. In the right light, if the sun is shining low and from the rear, the screen is also hard to read and can even reflect sunlight in a blinding manner. Still, we’re happy to have such full browsing functionality of our iPod and the system is light-years beyond VW’s last-generation screen that was only offered as part of the navigation package.

We’re looking forward to racking up many thousands of miles on our GTI over the next year. We’ll of course be modifying the car as we go along — those changes will be covered in greater on the pages of our VWVortex.com sister site, including analysis of installs and the technical side of things.

see what others are saying about this story...