FIGHT FOUR THE GLORY

THE LATEST INCARNATION OF VW’S HOT-HATCH ICON IS NOW SUFFICIENTLY UPMARKET TO TAKE A SWING AT THE 1 SERIES BMW ONCE SAID IT WOULD NEVER BUILD. THEY’VE GOT A LOT OF FRONT, THIS PAIR...

- CURT DUPRIEZ

THE STEADY AND MEASURED upmarket march of Volkswagen’s Golf and its associated pricing creep won’t surprise many a key observer. Yet it’s still easy to forgive a double-take at the sixty-five-thousand-dollar reality that is parking a nicely optioned version of the latest, Mk8 GTI in your car space.

This isn’t some special edition, spec fettled for exclusivity with skunkworks credentials, blessed by the bishop of Wolfsburg or as driven by the captain of Germany’s national football team. This is the regular GTI. In red. With leather.

Through a fairer lens, the $53,100 list price appears a much more palatable entry point for Mk8, replacing its like-for-like Mk7.5 performance-enhanced 180kW DCT forebear which was put to pasture at a fiscal high of $47,190.

But as my fully loaded tester’s electric comfort access draws my ventilated Vienna leather pew closer to the fuchsia-mood-lit and bedazzling, digitised dash fascia, I do wonder: what has happened to Volkswagen’s frill-free, everyman’s fun hatchback?

Golf GTI once symbolised something different, its seminal mould minted in the Mk5 of the mid-Noughties in basic, three-door, manual, Tartan-trimmed form. That version’s most authentic extrapolation was the Original, arguably Mk7 at its purest, mirroring its most basic forebear’s door, ’box and trim recipe if utmost importantly its spirit. It was $37,490 list. Just three years ago.

Now, the GTI is auto and five-door only. So less choice, but a package injected with frills and newfound fanciness to justify its fiscal climb, or vice versa. Despite carrying over much of DNA under the skin, this new Mk8 feels like something of a watershed moment for the nameplate, with aims to shed its working-class hot-hatch ethos for aspirations of grandeur.