The Golf R has a lot of other technik on the safety and driver assistance fronts that VW largely bundles into a package it calls IQ.DRIVE, including no less than five different “assists”: travel, lane, front, active side, and emergency (semi-automated assist for an unresponsive driver). It also adds an adaptive cruise system with stop and go, and rear traffic alert. Interestingly, there’s one other notable assist, Park Assist Plus, that didn’t make into the IQ.DRIVE cool kid assist club for some reason, a smart-parking-type system we’ve started to test out.
Act Your Age—Or Not
So, yeah, it has a plethora of solid safety and uplevel technology features and systems, and it looks good like a hot hatch should—one sporting the now famous Golf profile—inside and out. But the biggest thing you’re paying for over the GTI is what enthusiasts of any age want, an amped-up fun factor thanks to its high-strung turbo-four and a version of VW’s 4Motion with torque vectoring.
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Hold the gas and brake and get its launch control launching, and you’ll be blasting down a straight with the titanium exhaust brapp-brapping to a low four-second to 60-mph time, far better than the GTI. It also has Drift and R mode setups, so you can go deeper into some shenanigan-style behavior should you desire, and its prominent paddles are there to further spank the Golf R’s seven-speed twin-clutch automatic.
But when you want to play it calm, cool, and collected, the Golf R can also be a pussycat, as we’re finding out so far in our day-to-day to and from the office. Truth be told, while we poured out some Hofbrau for the death of the Golf R’s manual, we’re not big sad that we don’t have to shift and shift (and shift) in Los Angeles’ traffic horror show. Those of a certain age would rather engage stop-and-go cruise control route instead (my personal car has a manual, I swear, don’t hate me).