Volkswagen Polo GTI review

We’ll kick off this section with a little bit of good news, because although you may see haptic buttons on the steering wheel above, if you buy a new Polo GTI today it’ll come with proper, physical switches on the wheel. Hurrah!

VW initially introduced the capacitive wheel at the Polo’s facelift, but soon after it announced that it had listened to its customers and would drop the annoying controls on all of its models. A win for common sense.

Elsewhere inside, the Polo GTI is trimmed very nicely with the standard Jacara Red check cloth livening up the look and the seats offering decent support. Don’t expect anything overly sporty, though.

It may be a little garish, but we like the ‘Kings Red Gloss’ dash, and the 2022 facelift also improved the graphics on the 10.25in screen behind the steering wheel. You get three choices of display, but thankfully one of those is still a simple layout with two digitised round dials.

The central screen is a little slow to react to your inputs by modern standards, but it’s right-sized for a supermini and gets proper shortcuts along both edges. There’s also a proper volume knob!

Is it practical?

The GTI does lose some boot space compared to a standard Polo, but there’s still 305 litres of room back there. Consider quickly that the Abarth 500e gets a 185-litre boot and it doesn’t seem so bad at all. There’s also decent space in the rear, with two adults able to fit fairly comfortably.