The car you see in these photos is a near-production concept of the Volkswagen Golf VII GTI that will hit the dealerships next spring. It will be shown this week at the Paris Motor Show along with the standard seventh generation of the Golf. At the heart of the hotter model is a 2.0-liter turbo gasoline engine that produces 217 bhp, making it 10 bhp more powerful than the current Golf VI GTI. An optional performance package will lift the output by 10 bhp and include torque vectoring as well which promises to reduce understeer. The torque figure is also up by 70 Nm, for a grand total of 350 Nm, allowing the hot hatch to do the 0-62 mph sprint in 6.6 seconds, 0.3 seconds quicker than before.
The Volkswagen Golf VII GTI promises to return a decent 42.8 mpg UK, but we don’t know for the moment if this figure is possible with the manual transmission or with the DSG gearbox. The same thing can be said about the performance figures as well. As far as styling goes, there’s a redline on the GTI-style honeycomb front grille, a bunch of 17- and 18-inch alloy wheels and a twin chrome exhaust.
Compared to the regular Golf VII, the hotter GTI version has been lowered by 15mm, while inside the cabin it adopts a golf ball gear knob, a flat-bottomed steering wheel, traditional tartan seats and chronograph-style dials.
