Here Are 5 Things We Loved (And 2 We Didn’t) About The 2024 VW Golf GTI

The Volkswagen Golf may be celebrating 50 years on this planet, but the iconic performance variant, the GTI, is a few years behind, having been first revealed in 1976. The GTI still has life in it, though, and a fresh facelift will be arriving for the 2025 model year. But before the updated version lands – notably absent of a manual gearbox, despite our protests – I spent a final week with the pre-facelift Mk8 GTI to see whether we’ll miss it or not, and whether it still lives up to its billing as the perfect one-car garage for an enthusiast family.

That meant sticking the child seat in the back, loading up the trunk, and using it in everyday life, but also taking it out to enjoy a few spirited blasts in isolation. After a week in my care, these are the five things I loved the most, and two things I’d change.

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Love: Sophisticated Styling Without Being Too OTT

The GTI has always been a bastion of understated hot hatchery, exemplified by a simple body kit and little details that the average road user might miss, like a red stripe through the grille. In recent years, automotive trends may have dictated a slightly more out-there design approach, but the GTI tackles this with restraint. Hot hatches are largely dying out, but those that do exist tend to be visually loud, with flared arches, aggressive body kits, and big, proud wings. The GTI doesn’t care much for Civic Type R-like wings, and I think it’s better for it; whether you’re a young gearhead or an aspiring corporate, you can turn up at a meeting or an evening out and not feel ashamed of what others may think. It’s like a well-fitting dinner jacket that blends in whether you’re wearing it smart or casual. The Boy Racer aesthetic is overrated: the GTI nails the right balance.

Love: Great At Eating Up The Miles

The allure of a hot hatch has always been that it’s not going to crucify you every day for choosing it; it’s still a perfectly good road car. There’s arguably no greater test of that than longer-distance driving, where a small flaw quickly becomes amplified. Over long trips, an uncomfortable seat, improperly-tuned dampers, or a little too much wind noise can easily become pervasive threats to your sanity.

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But the GTI gets the balance right yet again, with comfortable seats that aren’t too aggressive nor too soft, and a suspension setup that laps up lumps and bumps. Driving the GTI out through the English countryside, where surface changes occur frequently, I was pleasantly surprised at the way it dealt with various surfaces and made any slightly twisting stretch fun, not just from a suspension perspective, but a road noise one, too. I’ve driven non-performance compacts with worse rides than this.

A caveat to this point is that while I was comfortable up front, sitting in the back is less fun, as my teenage boys readily reminded me. More on that in a moment, though.

Love: DSG Automatic Is Still The Best In The Business

I get it, we all want to #SaveTheManuals, and I’m as much a fan of shifting gears as any other card-carrying gearhead. But not everyone wants a manual, especially if you live in an environment where 90% of your driving is done in town, in traffic, and using your car as an appliance. Lest we forget, a hot hatch is meant to do both the mundane and the exciting with equal aplomb. For anyone who lives this sort of lifestyle and doesn’t want to sacrifice their car enthusiasm, I still maintain the seven-speed DSG in the GTI is the best compromise.

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Short of Porsche’s PDK transmission, this is arguably the best out there. The shifts are snappy when you’re hustling, the shift logic intuitive, and even prompting cog swaps manually via the steering wheel-mounted paddles is met with instant responses. But on the daily grind, it just makes things so easy; sitting in traffic, changing gears and modulating the clutch is one less thing to worry about in the GTI. Am I happy VW got rid of the manual for the facelifted GTI? Not at all – I still wish we had the option. But I understand why some hot hatch buyers may want an automatic, and the GTI’s dual-clutch is perfect for the application at hand.

Love: 241 Horsepower Is Plenty Of Power

We’ve become power-obsessed in the automotive world, and with EVs making insane horsepower easily accessible, it’s easy to fall into that trap of always wanting more, more, more. 241 horsepower (245 PS in metric) almost seems paltry, but I maintain that for a hot hatch that weighs only 3,188 lbs with the DSG, it’s a sweet spot. Key to that is the torque that backs it up: 273 lb-ft of the stuff available from as low as 1,750 rpm, which delivers a solid slug and seems to always be readily available, especially with the DSG. Getting onto a highway or merging from a slipway into free-flowing traffic, dropping the hammer gets you up to speed quickly, and despite only 241 hp, you seldom need to worry about not being able to manage an overtake of slower traffic.

Yes, others may have more power, and others may be quicker from 0-60 mph and quicker around a racetrack, but are those quite as good an all-rounder as the GTI for the same sort of money?

Love: Cheap Running Costs, At Least As Far As Gas Is Concerned

Maybe I come from a bygone era, but the concept of a hot hatch to me was always something affordable enough to buy, insure, and run for the mid-to-late 20-something-year-old with enough power to have fun, but not enough to land you in too much trouble. Affordability is now, more than ever, a tricky thing to find in a performance car of any sort, as wages have not kept up with inflation. But the Golf GTI is at least affordable to run from a gas mileage perspective. The EPA rates the GTI with the DSG at 24/33/27 mpg, figures we got close to in a week spent with mixed driving. Those are respectable figures, made even more palatable by the fact the GTI doesn’t require premium gas, only regular.

Not A Fan: Not The Practicality King It Once Was

I used to get upset in my younger years when everyone defaulted to the GTI as the hot hatchback of choice, but objectively, it was hard to argue otherwise, as it had the performance, it had the premium quality, and importantly, it had the practicality. But whereas other cars have grown substantially from one generation to the next, the GTI has remained a similar size. I’m not exactly a fan of cars growing exponentially and believe a compact car should be compact, but with two teenage boys and a toddler, plus their things to lug around, the GTI isn’t the practicality king it once was.

It’s not VW’s fault in some ways, but against the competition, it’s starting to fall short. With 19.9 cubic feet behind the rear seats, it’s nearly 5 cubic feet short of what the Civic Type R provides, but admittedly, 2 cubes more than the GR Corolla. Fold the rear seats, and the GTI opens up 34.5 cubic feet; not exactly a capacious cargo area. Honda and Toyota don’t provide specs for the rear seats folded on their hatchbacks, but the Civic is cavernous in our experience, only let down by the sloping tailgate.

Rear-seat space is arguably a far worse crime committed by the GTI. I’m not even going to try to convince you it’s the worst in the segment, as the GR Corolla is a bit of a letdown here, but again, the Civic, whether it’s the Si or the Type R, is way more comfortable with an extra 2.4 inches of legroom and more supportive seats.

Not A Fan: Infuriating Infotainment

I know, I know, you’re tired of hearing us beat this old horse, but the infotainment on the pre-facelift Mk8 GTI is a serious weak point. Haptic controls on the steering wheel, a lack of physical controls on the main screen and surrounds, and infuriating touch sliders without backlighting weren’t fun when the Mk8 first launched, and years later, they’re still terrible to use. But before I berate Volkswagen too much here, the automaker has responded to criticism on this, and while the facelifted 2025 hot hatch loses a manual gearbox, it gets physical buttons on the steering wheel and a revised infotainment system that’s much more intuitive and easy to use, even if the touch sliders still remain.

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Sources: FuelEconomy.gov, Volkswagen, Car And Driver, Motortrend.