This is a “3.8 litre” Golf, which sounds promising but actually means it consumes on average 3.8 litres of diesel to travel 100 kilometres.
It has a 55-litre fuel tank, so the Golf BlueMotion has a theoretical range of over 1400 kilometres. That’s enough to make two Singapore-KL round trips via the North-South Highway. Along the way, this unpretentious green machine will emit just 99 grams of CO2 per kilometre.
It will be a comfortable journey, too, because this is still a Golf Mk 6, with all the attendant advantages like a practical hatchback interior, stress-free driveability and a refined ride. Volkswagen engineers could have squeezed out a bit more mileage by reducing equipment and insulation, but this would have made the Golf BlueMotion even more of a compromise when compared to the blue-chip hybrid brigade that it is competing against.
Compromises do exist in the Volkswagen, admittedly – all of them green in colour. The 1.6-litre turbo-diesel engine, for example, is extremely economical and almost likeable (its low-end torque is nice), but it won’t exactly raise the pulse of a petrolhead. The 5-speed manual transmission slots cleanly, but its gearing has been set to deliver thrifty low revs in every forward ratio, with an in-dash gear indicator using little arrows to prompt you to change up or down for optimal driving efficiency – cute but uncool, especially since the last Golf I drove just before this was the R. And the Stop-Start system is a tad jarring whenever it kick-starts the engine from a temporary standstill.
The car otherwise behaves like a normal Golf, whether accelerating (which is adequate), cruising (which is quiet) or braking (which doesn’t feel funny despite the regenerative brakes). This doesn’t mean that the BlueMotion version is somehow abnormal. It’s just a little different, and of course, hugely efficient.
