Comments by "Stephen Hendricks" (@stephenhendricks103) on "" video.

  1. If you want a base Golf, get one soon. Here in the Pacific Northwest Golfs are being offered at $2500 to $3000 off MSRP, putting the price around $22K plus TTL. Leftover 2019 models are identical to the 2020 model and are offered for even less. The bad news is there is no 2021 Golf and the MK8 that would be a 2022 model in the US won't be coming to America. Only the GTI and Golf R are slated for the US. That's not surprising. While the basic Golf remains the best selling car in Germany and much of the rest of Europe, the GTI outsells the Golf 2 to 1 in the US. VW has a number of painful lessons that suggest American consumers want VW's to be quicker, larger, and cheaper than their European counterparts. As a result VW doesn't bother to sell the smaller Polo brand in the US and the Jetta, not even sold in Germany, is the volume leader among VW's sedans in on this side of the Atlantic and the basic Golf will disappear. Personally, I drive a GTI and feel the larger 2.0L engine, additional power and and upscale features are well worth the difference is price. But Joe is correct in suggesting that the Golf has many of the advantages of the GTI in terms of overall design (e.g versatility with great interior space, great visibility, excellent handling, etc.) and gets considerably better fuel economy than the GTI, an important advantage of the Golf in Europe where fuel is much more expensive than in the US. Furthermore, while Americans tend to think of performance solely in terms of straight line acceleration to 60 mph and quarter mile times, Europeans are more likely to judge performance in terms of comfortable cruising at 100 mph on well maintained highways and handling on twisting roads originally laid down more than 2000 years ago. The base Golf with its 14L turbo engine does all that very, very well. If I were in the market for a true European sports sedan with the interior room of a compact SUV at considerably less than $25K, the basic Golf would be on my list.
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