Volkswagen Golf Bluemotion 2015 Review

The fun thing about watching a car company with a toolbox full of engines, transmissions and architectures is the creative ways it finds to use them all. And, sometimes, the creative reasons they find not to.

Volkswagen has a peach of a petrol engine at its disposal in the little thumper of an EA211 three-cylinder, 999cc unit, developed for the Up!. While it’s under no threat of extinction (it was the CEO’s idea, after all), the Up’s sluggish sales mean the engine is just not getting the airtime it deserves.

But how much car can a 1.0-litre, three-cylinder petrol motor bear? It’s bearing a MINI just fine, but that engine is 1.5 litres and even the five-door MINI is actually Polo-sized, so the comparison is a bit misleading.

The Golf is a full size larger again and the engine is half-a-litre smaller, so that can’t work, can it? Really?

And yet here it is, working – working quite well, actually. Sure, it’s never going to be a threat to the Golf R, but the Golf R doesn’t score 4.3L/100km NEDC Combined figure now does it? Not even if you dropped it down a mineshaft, with the engine running at idle.

Yet that’s what the Golf TSI Bluemotion does, delivering just 99g/km of CO2 and doing it in some style. Even if Volkswagen cheated a little by launching the car in the world’s flattest country.

It’s downsizing gone crazy, really, delivering all of the Golf 7 chassis and packaging brilliance with an engine bay that looks incredibly roomy by modern standards.

But the genius of the engine convinced Volkswagen that all would be well. It points out that it actually is, surprisingly, the first mass production petrol engine to reach the 200Nm/L threshold, then backs it up with 85kW of power.

That lets Volkswagen pitch the car as the diesel you have when you don’t want to use the icky diesel pump. Or the hybrid you have when you don’t want to touch a gritty old power cable twice a day. Or just as a really economical car, full stop.
And still it does 204km/h at the top end, carries five people, and still has the same cargo capacity as the standard Golf. And the engine is also going into the wagon (alright, Estate) and the Sportsvan.

It’s a sophisticated little thing, with a diecast crankcase made from a new alloy, while there are sodium-filled exhaust valves and a new, high-strength, heat-treated cylinder-head made from an alloy called ALSi10Mg(Cu). Trick, huh?

There’s more. The head itself has all the valvetrain mountings integrated into its casting.

It needs extra strength because the exhaust manifold is integrated into it and cooled by the engine’s main cooling circuit. That heats the engine up quicker, so its cold-start emissions are lower, and also chills down the exhaust gases before they hit the turbo blades. The intercooler is also compactly packaged, mostly because it’s integrated into the intake manifold, and it’s also connected to the radiator coolant.

The turbocharger, with its cast austenitic steel housing, can deliver up to 1.6bar of relative pressure, while the fuel system pumps the petrol at up to 250bar, then squirts it in via five-hole injectors.

Then, to make it all run smoothly (having three cylinders in a four-stroke layout doesn’t inherently pump out a billiard table-like vibration graph), Volkswagen moved away from power-sapping counter-rotating balancing shafts and instead used calculated imbalances in the flywheel and the crankshaft pulley. Think of a mechanical version of your noise cancelling headphones and you’ll be close to the mark.

So, all in all, it’s a tricky little unit, which has the added benefit of weighing 89kg – or 14kg less than the four-cylinder 1.4-litre TSI motor you usually see in Golfs.

There are other tricks at play here besides the engine, though. The move to Bluemotion status has given the Golf a closed radiator grille and it has active, on-demand louvres that open and close-off the airflow to the radiator. You know, like BMW has been crowing about on its upcoming, flagship 7 Series limousine.

It uses energy recuperation techniques, idle stop-start and ultra low-friction tyres, plus some trick aero fiddles that pull its Cd down to 0.28. You don’t lose much of the fun in the twisty bits, even with the low-resistance tyres, because the Golf TSI Bluemotion has the sports suspension as standard gear, a decision made rational by the highway economy its lower (by 15mm) ride height helps deliver.

The proof of the madness is more on the road than it is in the numbers, but there are some numbers that help. The previous petrol-powered eco champ in the Golf range was the 1.2-litre, four-cylinder TSI, which is 10kg heavier than this one, uses 10 per cent more fuel and has 25Nm less torque.

It’s not just torque for the numbers, though, because it arrives at 2000rpm and sticks around for 1000rpm, while there is already 175Nm available at 1500rpm. The power peak hits at 5000rpm and stays for another 500rpm, too, so there’s a broad range of performance.

Don’t look at the 0-100km/h numbers (9.7sec), because that’s not what it’s about. Instead, it’s surprisingly muscular in the mid-range and it even walks the walk from below 2000 revs, which is remarkable for something that gets serviced by the local jeweller.

It’s ridiculously smooth, especially by the standards of the less sophisticated versions of the EA211 engine family, but it isn’t embarrassed by the bigger fours, either.

There are moments when you hear that it’s a three-pot, but there are very few discernible points in the rev range or the load range where you feel it’s a three-pot. All that, and it’s surprisingly nippy when you go to overtake.

And it also doesn’t feel like the discount version of the Golf. Ever.

This is, admittedly, an engine-heavy review because the engine’s the big step-change here. That, and the Golf 7 is a very well known critter by now.

And the new engine slips seamlessly into the highly-rated package, with the reduced weight over the front end actually making the Bluemotion feel fairly sparkly in the twisty bits. It’s the sort of car you’d imagine would be a lot of fun on downhill bends.

There’s the same security and comfort and space inside, the same packaging in the luggage area, the same high-quality plastics, neat-fitting dashboard parts and premium appearance as in the rest of the Golf family.

At €20,450 in Germany, it’s still got a lot of good stuff in it, including air-conditioning, an electronic diff lock, seven airbags, a rear spoiler, the sports suspension, 15-inch alloy wheels and the second-crash-dodging post-collision automatic braking system.

It’s a car that never feels like a diesel, but it never feels quite like it has the power delivery characteristics of a petrol four, either. It’s more linear in its power delivery than a diesel, but more diesel-esque than the four.

Its sophistication is clear in the seamless, almost imperceptible way it switches on and off with the idle stop-start system, or any time you prod the accelerator pedal, even in neutral.

Cruising at speed, it’s so smooth and quiet that you only really notice the wind noise from the mirrors and the A-pillars. And, embarrassingly, it was so smooth and quiet that your correspondent completely forgot it had a sixth gear for about 5km…

Combine that with a ride that feels solid, comfortable and completely at ease whatever the conditions and Volkswagen has a compelling package. There is every indication (from our launch drive, at least) that it will go pretty close to delivering on its claimed fuel economy numbers in the real world.

That could be great news for city dwellers and even better news for Australians trapped beneath a 110km/h speed ceiling. You could travel an awful long way on the Bluemotion’s tank without worrying about diesel particulates or sticky, smelly fingers.

And it’s an awful lot cheaper than the Golf GTE.

2015 Volkswagen Golf TSI Bluemotion pricing and specifications:
Price: $TBA
Engine: 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbo-petrol