Our cars: VW Golf 2.0 TDI 170 GTD 3dr - May - part 1

Volkswagen Golf
2.0 TDI 170 GTD 3dr
Run by Euan Doig, group production editor
Final mileage 29,889
List price £24,395
Target Price £23,583
Why it was on test To see if the GTD really did offer warm-hatch fun with decent running costs

Time flies when you’re having a hoot, and this past year with a Golf GTD has certainly been a bit of a blur. The choice of Golf was a pretty simple one: I live 90 miles from the office, so wanted a car that would be good fun and relatively cheap to run.

After much poring over the VW website, I settled on a three-door GTD in Tornado Red. Standard 17-inch alloys were left in place because I’ve yet to drive a car that works better on larger optional wheels. I also stuck with the standard cloth interior, because tartan is a classic VW seat pattern.

I kept my choice of options simple. The £365 Winter Pack came with headlight washers, heated windscreen washer jets and heated seats. It seemed wise given the past couple of winters we’ve had.

I park in a fairly busy street, so the £125 Luxury Pack with its self-dipping passenger door mirror and electrically folding mirrors looked like a sensible choice, too. The final option was chosen in a bid to keep my alloys pristine. Park Assist uses sensors to measure spaces and then steers the car into them automatically. At £500, it seemed like a bargain.

I picked up the car from West London Volkswagen (020 8996 5380), where sales manager Brett Wiggins took time to give me a run-through of my car’s features.
I left a very happy man.

Very quickly, though, a few issues surfaced. The headlights were misaligned, the fuel filler cap wasn’t attached to the car, the heated seats didn’t work and there was a whistle from the driver’s door. West London VW fixed almost all the faults quickly, but couldn’t trace the whistle. Eventually, my local dealer, Ridgeway Volkswagen in Wantage (0844 846 2364) found that the top edge of the door was out of line. It was fixed in just an hour.

After that, life settled down. My 180-mile daily commute was painless and the Golf was a joy on backroads. It was the perfect car for keeping this rat in the race.
The boot also took all we threw at it, from a mountain of garden rubbish to holiday luggage.

The Golf was economical, too. After a few days of driving like I had Miss Daisy in the back I’d managed to travel 600 miles before having to fill up. I was sure that distance wouldn’t be bettered. A few months later, colleague Barnaby Jones borrowed it for a week and squeezed 626 miles out of the tank! I’ve always said he’d go nowhere fast.

Soon enough, it was time for the annual Doig family holiday. The Golf took luggage for two and off we headed to deepest France for some peace and quiet. We went from Portsmouth to Caen with Brittany Ferries.

After we disembarked, the Golf was truly in its element. It dealt with the autoroutes easily and made the gnarly backroads near our destination a laugh.
The Golf drew glances wherever we went, perhaps because we didn’t see another GTD (or GTI for that matter) all the time we were there. Best of all, the Golf did the whole 1150-mile holiday on just two tanks of diesel.