Tag - 2012

Photos courtesy of Volkswagen of America. If you read my review of Volkswagen’s 2012 Golf R, you already know I found it to be a bit of a let down. The R isn’t a bad car by any means, but it didn’t quite stack up quite the way I’d hoped it would. No small part of that is due to the other two cars I drove the same day. In fact, if the Golf R had been the only performance Volkswagen in the bunch, I probably would have thought much more highly of it. After all, just about anything can be good in a vacuum. But the R won’t exist on its own as a sporty compact in this market. Indeed, it won’t even exist as such in its own showroom. For 2012, Volkswagen will sell no fewer than four compact cars powered by some variant of their two-liter, direct-injected, turbocharged four-cylinder–the aforementioned Golf R, the GTI, the new MkVI GLI, and the new (lower case “n”) Beetle. Read More