Volkswagen Golf GTD Variant: The Ultimate Diesel Wagon
If I had to come up with the perfect daily-driver, it would have to be frugal, boast a good range for longer road trips, be decently powerful and have sufficient torque, a manual gearbox is very important, it would have to be roomy, it would need to be reliable…
Quite a tall order, right? Well, the good news is that Volkswagen actually makes one such vehicle. The bad news is that they won’t bring it here.
- Also: 2015 Volkswagen Golf GTI: End-to-End
- Also: Volkswagen Golf R Variant: The Ultimate VW Is A Wagon
The GTD Variant takes the best elements from Volkswagen and merges them together: based on the spacious Golf Variant (by the way, what we call the Golf Wagon here is known as the Variant over in Europe), Wolfsburg's engineers have selected their renowned 2 litre turbodiesel powerplant to propel this car. With the addition of a few performance upgrades, it now produces 184 horsepower and 280 pound-feet of torque as early as 1,750 rpm. This enables the GTD Variant to get from 0 to 100 km/h in 7.9 seconds. Even better, this sporty family vehicle only sips 4.4 litres of diesel per 100 km. To give the GTD handling worthy of a sports car, Volkswagen took the suspension and steering out of a GTI. As a result, the Variant is now 15 mm lower, and combined with the 18-inch wheels and sporty bumpers, looks amazing.
The Volkswagen GTD Variant is already on sale in Germany, starting at 31,975 euros. In today’s economy, that equates to about $45,000. That’s a lot of money, but since this car is actually filling the role of a grocery-getter and a weekend car, think of it as a better deal than buying two vehicles…