Volkswagen e-Golf and Golf Plug-in Hybrid 2013: First Drive

Unlike Toyota’s unique model strategy, though, Volkswagen will tackle Prius with a plug-in hybrid version of an existing bodyshell.

Thus, the Plug-In Hybrid Golf will be on sale in 2014. And while it apes the Prius in being a parallel hybrid, VW thinks it’s stolen a march on the Toyota by delivering 50km of electric-only range and by giving the Golf PIH a 0-100km/h sprint time of 7.6 seconds, which is in the same ballpark as the Golf GTD.

And it hasn’t stopped there. VW boss, Martin Winterkorn, sparked off a war of words with Renault-Nissan boss, Carlos Ghosn, when he announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show that VW had its sights set on becoming the biggest seller of electric cars in the world by 2018. Ghosn, whose brands offered everything from the Nissan Leaf to the Renault Zoe and Twizy, used the corporate lingo version of a smackdown.

So there’s a zero-emission version of Europe’s usual number one nameplate and, for those who want to go further, a hybrid version with zero-emission capability as well. That’s on top of diesel, petrol, ethanol (for South America) and dual-fuel (CNG/petrol) models as well.

Due on sale in the European spring next year, the e-Golf (which will follow the smaller e-Up on sale, and thus will be VW’s second ZEV) will be pitched towards the top end of the current Golf range but beneath BMW’s bet-the-farm i3.

While BMW and Renault-Nissan have developed all-new vehicle architectures (and, in BMW’s case, an all-new brand), VW instead developed the entire Golf VII with electrification in mind.

That means, basically, that anything you can do in a current Golf, you’ll be able to do in an e-Golf (except, obviously, drive beyond its 190km maximum range.) Volkswagen also intends to offer an eight-year warranty on the lithium-ion battery pack, too, so there’s another worry mitigated.

In fact, this steady-as-she-goes styling approach to its first mass market electric model will limit the eco ‘bling’ to just a blue strip in the grille, a pair of unique badges, a couple of aero fiddles to improve the drag by 10 per cent over the stock Golf and top-end LED headlights. Other than that, most people will think it’s a stock Golf, albeit a very quiet one.

Lift the bonnet and you find that the powerplant has been ditched for an 85kW synchronous electric motor which spins at up to 12,000rpm. The motor is totally developed and built by VW and is mated to a single-speed gearbox.

Japanese giant, Panasonic, supplies the battery system. Weighing 318kg, the 264 lithium-ion cells sit beneath the boot floor and give the e-Golf 24.2kWh of energy.

A standard 240-Volt household electrical socket will take 13 hours to fully charge the e-Golf, but a fast-charging system (which should sell for less than 500 euros) could slash that to four hours, VW engineers insist.

All of that means that the interior of the e-Golf is untrammeled by floor, boot or any other compromises, with the exception of loss of the bottom part of the false-floor system of conventional Golfs.

The interior, too, is similar to normal Golfs and has an eight-inch, touchscreen monitor to allow you to switch between driving modes, to understand the range options and to find your nearest fast charging station.

One neat trick is the satnav, which can draw two perimeters on the map, one to show where you could drive to on your battery charge and the other to show where you could drive to and back again.

Familiarity has long been a VW hallmark (can you remember the last radical step in a Golf upgrade?) and the e-Golf treads a familiar path. Driving it will be instantly familiar to any Golf owner, even if they’ve never been in an electric car.

You turn the key, pull the automatic transmission lever into either Reverse or Drive and away you go, very quietly. Like any other auto (or DSG), it’s a two-pedal car and you push one to go and one to stop. It couldn’t be simpler.

And it’s also just plain nice. It’s silent, too, with the only intrusions being tyre noise and, as speeds rise, wind noise around the A-pillars. As you slow down, there can be some whine from the electric motor, too, but overall, it’s very quiet.

Cruising at 60km/h is a 40-decibel exercise, which means it’s about as quiet as a well-insulated bedroom at night time. Full throttle doesn’t make it jump much, either.

VW claims this car will hit 100km/h in 10.4sec, but the 4.2sec sprint to 60km/h is both far more relevant and far more impressive – better than a GTi, VW claims. The torque is all there, instantly, and the heavyweight Golf leaps away with immediate response and urgency. You can spend your days eking out more mileage from the batteries or you can drive it like a demon in traffic, enjoying its lag-free throttle response.

It’s not a dedicated freeway runner, but it’s not bad at the top end, running to 140km/h if it has to. The computers limit it to 115 in the Eco mode and 95km/h in the Eco Plus mode.

It has more tricks, too, with a variety of driving modes and five different options for harvesting regenerating power from the brakes.

Where the usual Golf would have an S mode behind the Drive slot, the e-Golf has a B mode (for brake recuperation). Pull this and the first part of your braking will send juice back through the electric motor and into the battery. Options ranging from D1 to D4 limit how aggressive that harvesting will be and you can switch between them via the steering-wheel paddles or flicking the gear lever like you would to change gears in a standard Golf.

It rides well, too, even if its extra weight demanded stiffer springs than the stock car, and it feels extraordinarily well integrated and together.

Range is always the biggest question and while the NEDC cycle came up with 190km, VW admits that could be anywhere between 130-190km, depending on the driving demands.

As with all electric cars, though, the e-Golf will make sense only to city dwellers looking for the family’s second car to cover same-day returns of no more than 140km or so. For most Australian cities, that’s doable.

Golf Plug-In Hybrid

But it’s heavy. At 1540kg, the Golf PIH is 30kg heavier than the pure-electric e-Golf. On VW’s own costs-per-100km measurements, it costs more to run than a Golf TDI, too, with VW claiming €5.39 per 100km where the TDI costs only €4.48.

Much of this relates to the choices VW made in its development. Firstly, it wanted a pure-electric range of 50km in real-world conditions. Hit that number and you’ve got London and a host of other major world cities, which waive congestion charges for zero-emission vehicles, in your pocket.

That range dictated a battery pack much bigger than a Prius can fit (for example). The 8.8kWh lithium-ion unit adds more than 125kg to the package alone.

The upside is that it has astonishing total system range and impressive total system performance and, like the e-Golf, it doesn’t ask any compromise inside the Golf, save for the sacrifice of the bottom tier of the boot’s false floor.

Where else can you find 50km of ZEV driving, a 0-100km/h sprint in 7.6sec in concert with an NEDC fuel economy figure of 1.5L/100km and emissions of just 35 grams/km? Not in a Prius, that’s for sure.

The PIH Golf is based around the 1.4-litre, turbocharged, direct-injection four-cylinder petrol Golf, complete with its 110kW/250Nm outputs. It sits its lithium-ion battery pack beneath the boot floor and uses an 80kW electric motor to both drive the front wheels and sent regenerating energy back to the boot.

And, when you reach the office, you can charge the Golf PIH on a wall charger to 80 per cent capacity inside 30 minutes.

Like the e-Golf, it asks its drivers to make very few compromises inside. There is more to do only if you want to explore the outer edges of its economy returns, but even VW’s engineers say people only do that to prove they can, then get back to just driving to work.

It shares the e-Golf’s eight-inch touchscreen system and also has the same adjustable brake regeneration abilities, but the major difference (aside from having a 40-litre petrol tank at the back) is that it has a six-speed DSG transmission.

It’s still a two-pedal operation, though, and the PIH system allowed VW engineers to be even cleverer in their software operations than in the e-Golf. For example, you can ask it to store the car’s electric charge (in case you’re driving from the country to the city) so you can use it later, or you can release it as needed along the way. And it has various options in between. You can even leave it up to the satnav to understand where you need to have ZEV running and where you can use the petrol engine.

And it has a sports mode, where it’s all hands manning the pumps and it shows this power distribution system on the elegant screen.

Unfortunately, there are compromises. There always are when a car runs two competing energy and motivational systems.

The first is that it’s not yet as seamlessly integrated as the e-Golf. On the version we drove, it had some jerkiness from the throttle into the cabin as it moved from full electric to the petrol mode and as the gearshifts tried to slide through. It also struggled with ride issues even more than the e-Golf, which was a surprise.

The petrol engine is smooth and performance even stronger now that it’s boosted at its lower reaches by the electric torque. It basically has 350Nm on tap at any point.

It’s fast in a straight line, it’s relatively comfortable and highly practical in its five-door body and you can eke out almost 1000km out of each tank. If its low emissions you need and you have access to a secure power socket, this answers many of the questions the e-Golf can’t...

Of course, if it’s straight up running costs in which you’re interested, you might be better off sticking with a Golf TDI.

This one will cost a lot of money, with VW executives hinting that it will only be a touch cheaper than the e-Golf…

Golf Plug-in Hybrid
Running costs (at €1.40/litre):  €5.39/100km
0-100km/h: 7.6 seconds
Top speed: 217km/h
NEDC range: 939km
Weight: 1540kg
System power: 150kW
System torque: 350Nm
1.4-litre TSI power: 110kW
1.4-litre TSI torque: 250Nm
Electric power: 80kW
Electric torque: 330Nm
Battery weight: 125kg
Battery capacity: 8.8kW/h
Fuel tank: 40 litres

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...

Don't forget to register to comment on this article.