What We Learned After Testing a Volkswagen Golf GTI for 40,000 miles

Welcome to Car and Driver. We've just wrapped up our 40,000-mile long-term test of this 2022 Volkswagen GTI. For this test, we drive that many miles in about a year or so in order to find what your new car is like to live with in the first few years of ownership and highlight any specific or strange issues that might crop up. Now, to do that with this car in particular, we drove it from Michigan to New York. We took it down to Virginia International Raceway. And as for living with it, we did all kinds of things, like one of our staffers taught his nephew how to drive stick. Another brought a newborn home from the hospital. It was his. Don't worry about it. And another one even took it deer hunting. Yeah, we did all that. We'll get into what it was like to live with and what you should expect if you're going to get a car like this. We got the base S trim, which costs just over $30,000. That meant we got the smaller of the two infotainment displays that you can get in a GTI. And don't worry, we'll talk about that much later. We didn't get a lot of creature comforts available, too, like ventilated front seats, heated rear seats, or a panoramic sunroof. We also didn't get the fancy 15-position electronically controlled adaptive dampers, like you get on the higher-end trim levels. But that's OK, because that's like 12 positions too many anyway. You do get a 241-horsepower turbo four-cylinder and a six-speed manual. And over the course of 40,000 miles, we had no complaints about this powertrain. We just loved it. We loved the way it sounded. We loved the linearity of the power delivery. It's got this great punchy mid-range that lasts until you get to the high RPMs of the engine. It always feels good, whether you're driving spiritedly on a back road or on the commute. It's great for making a quick merge or getting up a freeway on-ramp. It's just satisfying in a lot of ways, too. It's really, really enjoyable. What you don't get, though, with the base trim is summer tires. They're not even an option. Volkswagen reserves them for the top trim, Autobahn trim level, which costs nearly $10,000. That's very unfortunate. On the other hand, if you, like us, live in climate that gets snowy in the winter, it gives you an excuse to go out and buy a set of aftermarket wheels with summer tires for the fun months, let's call them. These Pirelli PZero All Seasons, though, don't do as bad as you might think. At our test track, we got 0.93g out of them around the skid pad versus the 0.98g we got out of an Autobahn trim with the summer tires. You will pay a bit, though, when it comes to braking performance, as you would expect with All Seasons versus summer tires. From 70 and 100 feet, we do our braking test, and that was a difference of 19 feet and 38 feet, respectively. Now, how about acceleration, especially dual-clutch versus this six-speed manual? Well, it's not that big of a difference, either. We got 60 in 5.8 seconds in the quarter mile and 14.2 seconds, and that's 3 tenths off the last dual-clutch GTI we tested with these tires. That's a difference we'd happily accept in order to have a manual transmission. Really, the biggest frustration of this car, and it's actually a minor annoyance when it comes to driving, is the micromanaging stability control system, which is always there looking in the background, even when the display is clearly telling you it's been deactivated. It's lying. And it really comes in to quell aggressive launches or really aggressive one-two upshifts, and that can take out some of the fun. That feels good. Now, of course, that's only stuff you experience at the test track or when you're driving the car really aggressively. When it comes to just the pure act of driving specifically on the road, this GTI is great. The ride's really comfortable. The interior is quiet. And the seats not only look cool thanks to that plaid pattern, they're really supportive as well in a way you might not expect just by looking at them. It overall is a really nice driving package that's also smartly sized. This vehicle doesn't feel small, but it is small in a way that makes it easy to navigate congested streets or a street park even in a city. That's a really nice plus. And it's still a really functional vehicle because you have a lot of cargo space in that hatchback. You may remember at the beginning, I said I had a colleague who took his newborn home from the hospital in this vehicle. And he said that there was enough space in here to support everything he needed for his wife's two-night hospital stay. He also said the back seat made loading and taking out the car seat really, really easy. That's really pleasant stuff to have in a vehicle that's this fun to drive, this comfortable, and this fuel efficient as well. Now, the base trim GTI gets you an 8.3-inch center touchscreen. We're going to talk about this in a bit. The downside is it doesn't come with onboard navigation or satellite radio. But it does support Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. So if you use those systems, you're not going to really worry about that too much. But it does start off the conversation about things that we didn't like that much about this car. What didn't we like? All of this, right? Well, fortunately, the smaller infotainment screen versus the big one that you get in the higher-end versions of the GTI, you get volume and tuning knobs. That helps in the higher-end versions that are like haptic sliders, which are frustrating. But the entire setup here, from the layout of the infotainment screen, how you interact with it, the haptic controls on the steering wheel, the touch-sensitive controls on the steering wheel, they're really bad to the point where they should probably get somebody fired if they haven't already. I'm not being hyperbolic. This was the greatest source of frustration out of everybody on staff here while we did our long-term test. It's the sheer unintuitiveness of everything. It's to the point that the way we worked around it was by using Android Auto or Apple CarPlay and using voice commands and also setting the climate control to auto just to minimize your interactions with this setup. It really is that annoying. The rest of our complaints were pretty small. There's no passive entry, even though I have the key in my pocket. In order to unlock the doors, I have to hit the Unlock button, then get in. This shift knob doesn't feel as nice as it should. There's this eco-minder that pops up that chides you for having fun while driving a hot hatch, which is really annoying. But fortunately, you can turn it off. If you want to adjust the custom settings of the custom drive mode, you can't do it while you're moving. So watch this screen. For your safety, the view is not available while driving. So that means if you want to see the difference between sport steering and comfort steering, you have to pull over and then make the change. Now, on top of being supremely enjoyable to drive, this powertrain was the poster child of fuel efficiency. Over the course of 40,000 miles, we averaged 30 MPG. And that included hard driving and driving in winter months on winter tires. That's 2 MPG more than the EPA's combined estimate. Not only that, though, when we did our 75 mile an hour real-world highway fuel economy test, we got 37 MPG, which is 3 MPG higher than the EPA's highway estimate. This is a very fuel-efficient hot hatch. For winter, we installed a set of Nokian Hakkapelita R5s. And at $274 a piece, they're on the higher end. But we quickly found out that you get what you pay for. So whitetail deer season starts in mid-November. And that staffer who took this thing out hunting had a really fun time, he said, joining what he described as a convoy of pickup trucks adorned with all kinds of mossy oak camo. He said the snow got to a point where the 4x4s were sliding through intersections, but the GTI on these tires went through just fine. The one issue he did point out was that the outermost bulb on the headlight assemblies, the LED bulb, doesn't generate enough heat to melt frozen road sludge. And after a while, that sludge would distort the lights. We had to get out and wipe them off a couple of times. Otherwise, he said he had a great time hunting with this thing. He said other hunters out there were understandably surprised by seeing the GTI navigate through the forest. But hey, it's quicker than a side-by-side. In fact, he said the only thing this thing can't do is lure in a 30-point buck. We had a service visit every 10,000 miles or so. And it's for the usual stuff, oil, oil filter, cabin air filter change, the basics. Those cost us around $100 on each visit, except for the 40,000-mile service, which called for a really in-depth inspection process. And the labor rate on that sent the price to over $400. So be prepared. Other costs included a pothole that we hit, which knocked our alignment around. And that cost us about $200 to straighten back out. The dealership also tried to charge us a couple hundred dollars to recalibrate the driver assist systems. But after we talked to Volkswagen, they told us they would recalibrate on their own. Except for an error we started to get. It would just say Travel Assist Unavailable on the dash. We learned later that the fix for that is a new steering wheel, like literally a new wheel. We put an order in for one, and we're still waiting for it. The same goes for another part. Later in life, we found some oil weeping from a line going to a turbo. The fix is a new seal. We ordered the seal. And again, we're still waiting for it. Let's talk about tire wear projections. Don't expect to get more than 30,000 miles out of these Pirelli All Seasons. We did our first tire rotation at 10,000 miles, and the fronts were already pretty chewed up by that point. So we tried to do our tire rotations more frequently after that. Try to aim for around 5,000 miles to stretch that life out as much as possible. At our dealership, tire rotations weren't part of normal scheduled service. So we had to request that specifically each time. Our GTI was subject to one recall that had to do with the shifter. You may recall Lightning Lap last year. One of our drivers, in a bit of enthusiasm, removed the shifter during an upshift. Look. That shouldn't happen anymore. Where does that leave the GTI at the end of our test? Well, it can be an appealing package so long as you go into it with both eyes open. Yes, the infotainment system and the controls on the steering wheel are not good at all. They were the focal point of our staff's entire frustration and annoyance every single time we drove the car. On the other hand, though, if you could find a way to live with it or work past it, you'll be rewarded with a very comfortable, very fuel efficient, and very practical car that's also extremely fun to drive.