Volkswagen unveils Golf 7.5

You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but Volkswagen's vital facelifted Golf '7.5' brings with it big step changes in technology.

It will swap in two all-new 1.5-litre engines, the current Golf's six-speed dual-clutch transmission is out for an all-new seven-speeder and it will use gesture control to operate the multimedia functions for the first time in the small-car class.

Launched in an on-line stream event from Germany today and due on sale in Australia by mid-2017, the Golf VII.V will also deliver a major step in autonomous technology, with the ability to temporarily brake, steer and accelerate by itself.

Still built in three- and five-door hatch configurations, plus a five door wagon, the upgrade will also usher in an era of standard LED tail-lights and optional LED headlights, including the animated turning indicators introduced by Audi, and has pedestrian detection systems combined with autonomous emergency city braking.

While the design is largely the same and the underpinnings are nearly identical to the Golf VII, which launched at the 2012 Paris motor show, there are new engines with improved economy. And the GTI hot hatch gets even more power and a brighter, shinier red strip across the grille to denote its extra performance.

New engines
Though he pushed BMW to deliver a 1.5-litre three-cylinder engine during his time as the Bavarian company’s development boss, brand chief Herbert Diess has now delivered a pair of four-cylinder 1.5-litre motors for Volkswagen.

There will be a new direct-injection, turbocharged 1.5-litre petrol motor, plus a diesel four-cylinder with the same capacity.

The engines are more expensive to build but lighter and more economical than the 1.4-litre petrol engine and 1.6-litre TDI they replace.

The 1.5-litre petrol engine also features fuel-saving cylinder-on-demand technology to shut down the middle two cylinders on either light throttle or constant cruising speeds.

The petrol engine, code-named EA211, will deliver 250Nm of torque from 2500rpm and will peak at 110kW of power. Volkswagen is claiming it will deliver 4.9L/100km on the NEDC cycle, which equates to around 110g/km og CO2.

There will also be a fuel-sipping 96kW BlueMotion version of the engine, with 200Nm of torque from only 1000rpm, which delivers a sailing mode that decouples the engine when the driver lifts off the throttle and uses a radical combustion technology derived from the Miller Cycle technology Audi uses in the A4. The BlueMotion 1.5-litre Golf 7.5 will post a claimed 4.6L/100km on the NEDC cycle, or down to 104g/km of CO2.

The new engine will also find its way into next year’s all-new Polo, the Tiguan, the Audi A1 and A3 and small Seat and Skoda models.

Both new engines use the existing Volkswagen engine architecture in their move to 1.5 litres, with the petrol engine using a longer stroke to move up from 1.4 litres, while the 1.6-litre TDI has its bore shrunk to reach the smaller volume.

Both of the 1.5-litre motors are from the same modular engine family as the upcoming 1.0-litre turbo three-cylinder and will be built on the same production lines.

“It will be an evolutionary step for the petrol engine up from the 1.4-litre,” Dr Diess explained at this year’s Detroit motor show.

“The diesel engine will also be a development down from the 1.6-litre turbo,” he explained.

In his former position at BMW, Diess insisted a modular engine family with a uniform cylinder capacity of 500cc was the best compromise between power, friction, swept volume, weight and efficiency, but he went another way at Volkswagen.

“The point is for performance and for economy that 1.5 litres is the best compromise for now.

“The difference between my position on this at BMW and at Volkswagen is the scaling of it here. The volumes are much different.

“It makes sense to produce them for CO2 regulations, because they are more expensive than the current engines,” he explained.

GTI and GTE
While the GTE plug-in hybrid is more or less unchanged, the GTI hot hatch sees its power output jump from 162kW to the Golf 7 GTI Performance figure of 169kW, while the hotter GTI Performance moves to 180kW.

Volkswagen has yet to make claims about the new performance data for the GTI siblings, but expect the stock GTI to whip to 100km/h in 6.4 seconds and the GTI Performance to be there a tenth of a second sooner.

The GTI will be denoted further by fatter tail pipes.

New safety tech
The Golf gains some serious partly autonomous tech for its price tag, delivering everything from autonomous city braking to traffic-jam assist and lane-keeping assistance.

Its radar-guided active cruise control is upgraded, with the sensor moving at the same time from that annoying little square in the lower air intake to hiding behind the Volkswagen badge in the middle of the grille.

The active cruise control is critical in helping the Golf move to providing the range of forward-focused active safety features.

For city driving, the radar and a camera ahead of the rear-vision mirror combine to deliver a pedestrian-detection system that combines with a host of other electronically-governed systems t stop the car automatically, even if the driver ignores the car’s initial audible warning.

Its autonomous emergency braking also works for larger, heavier objects than pedestrians, including cars, trucks and motorcycles.

While the car also has the ability to move autonomously in a traffic jam, taking the steering, accelerating and braking tasks away from the driver, it still demands the driver keeps his or her hands on the wheel to smooth out the changeovers when the car needs to hand back control to the human operator.

Its new lane-keeping assistant has been designed to keep the car in the centre of the lane, rather than near one edge, and will choose the middle lane out of three as its default choice, though it will stay wherever the driver tells it to.

If all that fails, it’s also equipped with a pre-crash setup, which pre-tensions the seat belts to hold the driver tight and in the best airbag-protection position.

Should all that fail to keep the car straight, it now has automatic accident reporting and places an automatic call to emergency authorities after a crash, reporting the car’s location.

Its parking-assistance systems have also been upgraded and the Golf can now self park in parallel parks or in 90-degree, rear-first parks.

Interior tech upgrades
The headline act here is gesture control, but it’s ably supported by larger, higher-resolution touchscreens and the introduction of the Virtual Cockpit first seen on the Audi A3.

An easy fit, due to the Golf and the A3 sharing their MQB architectures, the Virtual Cockpit uses a 12.3-inch screen to replace the analogue dials and can be configured in five different layouts with the navigation shown in either 2D or 3D.

All of the Golf’s infotainment systems have been upgraded, with the standard five-inch, 400 x 240-pixel and the optional 6.5-inch 800 x 480-pixel screens pushed pushed up to an eight-inch, 800 x 480-pixel unit.

Gesture control comes to the Golf only in the Discover Pro unit, which features a 9.2-inch touch-screen with a 1280 x 640-pixel resolution.

The scroller system has been banished, with the Discover Pro screen using five buttons mounted vertically on the left for things like “home”, “menu”, “on/off”, “louder” and “quieter” controls.

The gesture control works by swiping your hand horizontally to move through menu screens for the audio system, radio stations and the playlists, while it backs up the visual indications with an audible tone to tell you a choice has been made.

The gesture-control system is governed by proximity sensors in the multimedia unit and is backed up with voice controls and old-fashioned touch controls on the screen itself.

The connectivity takes care of most smartphones, hooking them into the car’s own stronger antenna, through MirrorLink, CarPlay and Android Auto.

It will also deliver details like four 20W outputs, a DVD player, two standard USB connections (another two are optional), slots for two SD cards, a 10GB hard drive and an old-school aux-in plug.

The Golf facelift is considered by Dr Diess to be the first car from Volkswagen’s Future Pact plan, which will see it launch 10 new cars next year and renew the complete line-up by 2020.

The first electric car to be upgraded as part of the brand’s surge to have 25 electrified models by 2025 will be the all-electric e-Golf, which it will launch at next week’s Los Angeles motor show, complete with 300km of zero-emission range.