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BERLIN – Following an especially tense rocket launch, astronaut Wally Schirra was asked what he was thinking about during liftoff.
“This was all put together by the lowest bidder,” he quipped.
We had a Schirra moment while cruising on the autobahn during a test drive of the ’10 Volkswagen Golf. We had to make a sudden lane change and stop because of a traffic backup.
Right before we yanked the steering wheel at 115 mph (185 km/h) and stood on the brakes, we remembered the base price of our Golf was $17,490.
Fortunately, the car responded crisply and halted like a finely tuned German sports sedan. There was none of the chassis wiggling and tire screeching you would expect trying to wrestle a small car in this class to a stop from such high speed.
Not many similarly priced cars sold in the U.S. can handle high-velocity maneuvers with such composure.
We definitely would not want to try such evasive maneuvers with most of the skinny-tired “sensible” small cars the standard Golf competes with in the U.S., or the hybrid-electric vehicles that contend in the same price range as the $22,000 diesel-powered TDI version.
Superb engineering and driving dynamics have made the new sixth-generation Golf the most popular car in Europe and one of the long-time best-sellers in the world, with 26 million delivered since the first generation debuted in 1974.
