Gadgetory

after years of caterwauling by VW enthusiasts Volkswagen finally brought the hottest golf to the US the Golf R this guy demotes the GTI to vice president in this country but is it the right choice when you're going to go CNET style let's drive this 2012 Golf R and check the tech now if you want to spot a Golf R aside from the little teeny badges that live around the body look at the but you've got center mounted dual exhaust outlets dead giveaway also look for a lower stance on the car mild body hit under the skin there's more power out of the engine 6-speed only sports suspension all-wheel drive ok our Golf R is missing one key option package the navigation and sunroof thing you know real logical combination I don't know but without that we still have a touch screen media head unit and you got all the sources you need and one or two that you don't AM and FM both have HD capability as well your satellite radio functionality good readout here you get good readouts of the various station information and such under your media tab you've got the four main acts here CD is a six disc integral changer right up here at the top very nice SD card yeah that's one of those I mentioned that you don't need media input refers to this thing the MDI connector which is an Audi Volkswagen thing now the one I've got in this car as you can see still has the traditional 30-pin iOS connector for an iPhone or an iPod Touch I've had to adapt it to this iPhone 5 right here and as you can see it works fine we're seeing no issues with logic control or screen readout now because you're using this MDI connector and not a USB jack like a lot of other cars do you're going to have to buy different pigtails here for let's say a USB female jack if you want to plug in a thumb drive or any other device this is a relatively old-school backwards idea right now I talked to Volkswagen this morning and so far nothing on the horizon to bring a lightning cable to this port so you are going to have to use this adapter this whole mess and the console is not very friendly here with this iPhone on a cable I've got nowhere to put it though it just kind of has to hang they're not real elegant to be honest and of course finally you've got bluetooth streaming audio which looks good nice use of meta tags the logic and the response is kind of pokey but that's at least with my Android 4.0.4 phone you may have different results if you get the nav package you're also going to get a better audio system we have this interface here for the bass treble volume and fader and such but the Dynaudio 300 watt 8 speaker rig comes with the navigation upgrade as well and at this moment let me get up on my soapbox not so much picking on VW as almost every car maker why do you put these kinds of settings on a touchscreen nobs do it better they're cheap and they're proven yes you got to put some additional parts in I guess but dealing with digging through menus and all this poke poke poke nonsense for bass and treble or dragging these around that's not better than knobs that's worse this is screen interface for screen interfaces sake now when our is basically a GTI on steroids under the hood same basic iron block aluminum head two-liter intercooled turbo engine but with more oof bigger turbo hotter tuning 256 horse 243 foot-pounds of torque it's this 3,300 pound car to 60 in about 5.6 seconds and it also delivers 19 27 mpg not bad those numbers are 56 higher on the horsepower for this car and 36 higher on the torque substantial increases now all ours are all-wheel-drive GT is or not all ours come with a 6-speed manual and that's it GT eyes can also get a DSG automated dual clutch what I like about the Golf R is it's kind of meatiness there's nothing fussy about this car same can be said for the GTI it's a German DNA thing and it's certainly not lost in this variant the turbo charging in this car bigger turbo it's doing more of a boost job but it's not ending up being laggy er put it this way it's not any of being leggy er than I'd like I don't have a GTI here to compare it to but this car has got good power delivery not frantic but substantial now since you only have a 6-speed manual to play with it better be a good one this one is the clutch and gearbox action are pretty darn good I'm not real crazy about this sort of popping in and out of each gear I would like a smoother engagement but that may wear in with time another nice thing about this car is the power is not too much in other words you can drive it flat-out when you really want to have fun with it and you're not going to get exited off the orbit of the earth it's substantial power but not goofy power ride quality in this car is actually quite nice firm well planted you definitely feel a nice leveling sports suspension but without the taking road inputs that I had recently and let's say the Nissan Altima which also had its own variant of a firm suspension but it was just constantly needling you through the bottom of the car the bottom line I don't know if this car is any more fun than a GTI you got to be pushing it pretty hard to get that all-wheel drive system which in this car is built for performance not for off-road traction so much to really get the benefit of that it's really kind of a track car which I don't know if you're going to use in that respect so much okay let's price this bad boy we have a 2012-2013 prices or what I'm telling you just under 30 for base for the two-door they've also got a four-door kinda doesn't make sense to me in an R but to your money the best deal out there though it's kind of a weird package it's 1,500 bucks for navigation the power glass roof keyless access and the Dynaudio audio upgrade it's a great price though I'm not a huge fan of the head unit in general but at that price I can become one the other options you got on here are all pretty much non tech this car is about 36 CNET's top