Volkswagen Golf R review

Gone are the days that a Golf R was an attainable, conspicuous bargain. That’s not necessarily VW’s fault, mind you. A GR Yaris is £45k. A Honda Civic Type R is north of fifty grand. An Audi RS3 gets scarily close to sixty thousand. That the R costs just shy of £44,000 and comes very well-equipped means overall, it’s priced relatively competitively.

You can expect monthly payments to add up to around £450 a month. At the time of writing (immediately after the launch of the facelifted Mk8) VW UK is generously adding a £2,500 deposit contribution to Golf Rs bought via its own in-house ‘Solutions’ financing plan, but don’t expect that offer to stick around.

Once the Golf R is on your driveway, running costs aren’t too bad. We ran a long-term test of the pre-facelift car and recorded fuel economy of around 32mpg in mixed driving, falling to mid-20s if the car was used in anger.

As mentioned earlier, don’t bother with the £3k+ Akrapovic exhaust system: the vast majority of what you hear inside is digitally generated (or sounds it, at any rate) and this is not a musical engine at the best of times, and a trick Slovenian exhaust can’t do much about that.

Upgrading to the most handsome 19-inch rims costs around £1,100, while the £600 Harman-Kardon stereo upgrade is money well spent as Volkswagen’s standard hi-fis are more strangled than Bart Simpson. Weirdly, adaptive suspension is a £720 option that really ought to be standard (it is on German market cars, who don’t need it because their roads are smoother than glass).