This Golf is a car of assured performance whose availability doesn’t seem to depend on a fully charged drive battery.
While the conditions may have been a factor in robbing the front axle of a little traction at nearly full charge (when it suffered flurries of momentary wheelspin), we actually recorded slightly faster standing-start acceleration when the battery was indicated as almost flat. This can be considered proof that the car suffers with little or no meaningful ‘charge drain’ performance deterioration.
With a GTE variant sold alongside it, of course, you might imagine eHybrid buyers to be less interested in outright performance than drivability, refinement, efficiency and EV range. In these respects, our test car hit fairly consistent high standards, its odd lapse here or there notable mostly in contrast with the prevailing maturity, smoothness and good manners that characterise the car more widely.
It almost always gets under way under hushed electric power. Selecting Sport driving mode doesn’t induce the combustion engine to run constantly, and so when you do use full power from rest, there is an instant when the car seems to have it all to do to get its pistons reciprocating, and then deliver combustion torque to the front axle.
And yet there’s no particular sense of it being flustered by the challenge. In electric-only running, meanwhile, there’s plenty of performance at speeds of up to 50mph. VW’s tachometer is useful in making it clear when a deeper dig of power will be likely to rouse the engine, which usually chimes in very quietly and smoothly, and only picks up any notable edge of coarseness at high revs and under load. Faster A-road and motorway running more often requires some combustive back-up – but even here extended zero-emissions cruising periods are easy to achieve.
The Golf eHybrid’s brake system showed no evidence of problems with fade on track. There was some strange pedal progression at low speed, but only on rare occasions and to a minor degree.