VW Golf 1.4 TSI 7spd DSG (2008) CAR review

Seven gears? If you´d written in 2001 about a car with seven forward gears you´d have been writing a comedy piece about over-complexity. The on-line satirical magazine, the Onion, wrote a joke item about Gilette launching a razor with I think four blades. And what happened? Someone did indeed launch a four-bladed razor. What´s my point? Seven gears is too many. Simple. Why would VW want such a huge choice in their engines and gearboxes? Well, much in the same way tha mobile phone tariffs are designed to be so complex that customers give up trying to make comparisons, so is VW adopting a similar strategy to confuse their customers. Instread of deciding between a Golf or a Focus or Proceed, the customer just gets lost trying to decide which Golf they want. They are so astonished by the huge array of options that they simply forget there are other cars to choose from, from other makers, in other showrooms, somewhere out there. But the long list of numbers and specs and details fries their brain and means they leave having agreed to buy a car with an engine/gearbox combo totally unsuited to driving to Tescways or Saferose or to work. Instead they get a car designed for 23% high-altitude motorway use and 73 percent use in very hilly suburbs with light traffic and severe winters but severe summers too. That´s what I think the VW Golf 1.4 TSI 7 speed DGS is for. And I guess the car is 65cm wider than normal to accomodate all that badging. And that means it weighs more and uses more fuel. To answer the question of why the Germans have so many new amazing ideas you need to understand that if they hire more engineers than anyone else, then Ford and Renault won´t have any engineers of their own. Even if the work the engineers do for VW and Merc is stupid, it means they can´t work on useful stuff for the competitors. Think on this: it takes ninety experienced engineers to design a new engine. If those ninety engineers were available to Citroen, they could make producst off of which things didn´t fall at random. Ford could have a second engine option for the Ka and they could have a third engine option for the Focus. It only has two, you know, a 1.6 and a 1.6 Ghia! So, there you are. It´s quite simple really.

Is'nt it amazing the engineering output from the German M'fers recently. We have 2 DSGs from VW, daft V12 diesel sports cars and RS motors from Audi, bmw's intelligent dynamics, twin turbos 2.3 and 3.0's, in petrols and diesels, super clean direct injection petrol engines. Merc produces a niche model every week. How many engineers have they got working in R&D? Ok you might not expect the smaller players to compete but Honda seems no where, Totota is hybrid focused, Ford struggles to match in one segment 2.0 litres the technology of that BMW that offers it accross capacities. How are they doing it?