Nothing has gone wrong, however as I have only had it a couple of weeks I wouldn't have expected anything yet.
The car was a 'distress purchase' as our 10 yr old Polo was viciously attacked by another car coming out from a side road and written off.
The Golf is a great car to drive, the diesel provides fantastic mid range acceleration in all gears, although with the small rev band of the diesel it does mean a lot of speedy gear changing to get the best from it. There is a lot of luggage space with the rear seats folded down and a small lip means that you can get bags of cement into the back fairly easily. We are hoping that it will also prove to be an able tow car, although the low ground clearance may prove to be a bit of a problem.
The controls for the heating/cooling are extremely difficult to find and operate. They are about 6mm square push buttons located in a row at the bottom of the central console and require you to take your eyes off the road for 15 seconds or so to find the required control. They need to have tactile markings on them, ideally the whole unit needs to be repositioned to the top of the console.
The lights are like glow worm's arm pits compared with those on a mark 2 Golf GTi and are really disappointing for such a performance car, auxiliary spot lights are a necessity here.
The warning hooters and buzzers on the console are irritating and give the feeling that we are being treated as incompetent and are unaware of our driving operations.
The electronic diff lock seems to work quite well, although it is interesting that the works rally golfs have a mechanical LSD fitted so there must be downsides to it.
The ECU doesn't allow you to have the brake and accelerator pressed at the same time. If you do that the engine shuts down to an idle, which is potentially dangerous. It doesn't enable you to dry the brakes out after having gone through a ford or deep water and you can forget left foot braking.
This is an update to the report I wrote. I have now run about 4000 miles since I bought it. I am still pleased with it overall, but there are features which I am not happy with. The headlights are still proving to be extremely frustrating and provide not nearly enough illumination on main beam. The warning lights, bells and whistles are horrendous. I even had one telling me the washer bottle was getting empty... for goodness sake!!!.
I have had the car's central locking work when I shut the tailgate and it locked all the doors... good job I hadn't left all my keys inside. In my opinion there are far too many electronic niceties on this car all waiting to go wrong and give you grief and not adding in any way to the driving experience
However the really bad occurrence was the air con compressor which bust at 13000 miles..O.K. it is being replaced under warranty, but it should never have happened and goodness knows what collateral damage the gorillas will wreak when they change the unit. I am starting to get less impressed.
I have now had this car 18 months or so. It is now going in to the VW dealer to have the cooling fans replaced as they have burnt out. The symptom was a horrid vibration at idle speed with the air con switched on.. It was apparently due to the air con heat exchanger not getting cooled properly because the fans weren't working... I am now becoming fairly disappointed with this car and will probably sell it when the three year guarantee is up as this would have meant serious money to repair a new car if it hadn't been guaranteed. Not a happy experience, I think the manufacturing quality of VW has gone downhill.
I've reached the same conclusion as you re: VW's quality standards after two less than reassuring years with a 115PS version of this car. Horrendous oil consumption, squeaks and rattles all over the place, two broken glovebox catches, a blown MAF sensor and a set of failed glow plugs. All this by the time the car had done 40,000 miles.
A shame, as there aren't many cars out there with such a great performance/economy balance and nothing else in the class feels so expensive inside. Sadly, the engineering under the skin, and assembly quality is woefully wide of the mark. How could such a once unquestionable manufacturer of quality cars risk their reputation like this?
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