Volkswagen Design Vision GTI 2013 Review - International

That’s why we find ourselves here, in the gigantic, rough bitumen carpark attached to a deserted horse racing track and alongside the former home of the LA Lakers basketball team.

Sitting amongst all this splendor is Volkswagen’s Design Vision GTI, a car that wowed the VW faithful at this year’s Worthesee GTI fest, but drew cynical reactions from industry observers.

Essentially everybody thought the DTM-style vision of a Golf Mark VII taken to extremes was just a static display of what you could do with a wider, longer and far more muscular GTI. It’s questionable whether Volkswagen will ever build as many cars off its MQB small-car architecture as journalists have written words about it, and VW just wanted to show exactly how far the thing could be stretched.

And it sits here in California’s gentle rain to prove that it’s not a static display, but a fully fledged fast car, capable (with a little more development) of falling just shy of a 300km/h top speed and bursting to 100km/h in less than four seconds.

The Design Vision GTI isn’t like any other MQB-based car. For starters, it’s not front-engined and it doesn’t have four cylinders (unless thou then proceedeth to six). It has a brand new VR6 engine, and with a pair of turbochargers instead of the GTI’s one.

It’s a much-loved engine, that old narrow-head VR6, but one that had issues with weight and consumption, not to mention specific power. This one is based around the GTI’s per-cylinder architecture and packs in just shy of 500bhp (372.85kW).

A day earlier, this car made its US debut beneath the lights of the LA Auto Show and looked more like it should have been at SEMA. Yet the Klaus Bischoff-designed Design Vision GTI is a running machine, built to show the faithful the extremes to which VW could take the GTI – both visually and mechanically.

It’s the sort of car that, if developed to meet its potential, could set a German cat amongst the baby-supercar pigeons.

It seems crazy at first glance, but the Design Vision GTI is far too visually organised to have been designed anywhere but HQ. It takes every Golf visual cue and accentuates it, spreading the width, dropping the height and adding muscle and sharpness at every angle.

It’s shorter by 15mm, with the 4253mm overall length putting an exclamation point on the brutal proportions VW has given its tiny tearaway, and most of that is because the rear overhang has been slashed away. Then there’s a 57mm chop in height thanks to a lower roofline and the body is 1870mm wider than the stock GTI. That elasticity from Bischoff’s imagination has let the engineers push the front wheels 57mm wider (to 1595mm) and the rear wheels sit 63mm further apart (to 1579mm).

Just about the only dimension that remains from the Golf is its wheelbase, but don’t let that fool you into thinking the core engineering is the same as the stock GTI. It isn’t.

Most of the car’s radical body panels are plastic or carbon-fibre and there are no rear seats and it has no soundproofing whatsoever, but VW is refusing to claim a weight figure for the wildest GTI ever built. It should be lighter in theory, but that’s no guarantee, especially with more engine, more turbos and more cooling.

With 3.0 litres of narrow-angle, shared-head VR6, the Design Vision is a thumper, with 370kW of power at 6500rpm and 560Nm of torque from 4000rpm. It still uses a Haldex all-wheel drive system (from the all-paw Golf 4MOTION) and a six-speed DSG transmission.

If this sounds outrageous, it’s not that far out there in la la land. There are rumours that a detuned version of the entire thing will wind up in the next Passat and it has already seen duty (with less power) in the CrossBlue Coupe SUV concept.

There are cars that make you smile and, despite its development limitations, the Design Vision GTI is one of them. That a company as conservative as Volkswagen could proudly show off something this outrageous is just one of the reasons you smile, the other is just how coherent the thing looks, and from every angle, too.

The entire passenger compartment is a very driver-centric place nonetheless, with the entire dash area tilted towards the pedal pusher and the car’s exterior designer, Andreas Mindt, insisted its body panels were designed to do exactly the same thing.

The interior is the shoddiest piece of the car, but that’s a common show-car shortcoming. It has been pieced together for looks to prove the design works, rather than pieced together to work. The materials aren’t production quality and neither is the software behind the TFT dash screen and the multi-media display. The door handle is a Gallardo bonnet release lever, mounted in the sill, while you close the door with a bright red fabric loop in the inner skin.

The stuff that actually does work is straight out of the existing GTI, including an electric park brake, the indicator and wiper stalks, while there is an enormous cross brace where the rear seat would normally be.

The flat-bottomed steering wheel, complete with its shift paddles, has just one button and one switch. The button starts the car, while the flimsy switch toggles between the Design Vision GTI’s Street, Sport and Track driving modes, which fiddle with the car’s dampers and the tuning of that powerhouse V6.

Starting the thing is a highlight, with zero histrionics and none of the wire-tape-zip tie feel that a lot of rolling concepts have. With most concept cars, you can see the relief on a minder’s face every time it fires up.

But this car’s favourite trick comes when you stomp on the throttle. It’s as though the cleanly civilised companion you had been talking to has been replaced by a pro wrestler, all loud and aggressive and strong and with plenty of show pony.

It gets very loud very fast and it gets very fast very fast, too. It’s as though the barrel-chested bouncer you always knew was there suddenly turns around and starts yelling and shouting.

The friendly idling nature of the VR6 disappears and a monster snaps into place, barking, snapping, howling and whistling with forced-induction fury.

And it has the grip to pull it all off and make use of all the twisting that comes in a wave with the noise and attitude. The all-paw system makes the Design Vision GTI leap, hard, and above 1500rpm there is no lag at all. It’s just an attack dog.

Each up shift is a rifle crack and a renewed surge of energy. Each throttle lift-off takes you back to the trilling whistle of a late 1990s Group A Ford Sierra WRC car. Each millimeter of throttle opening seems responsible for letting more and more shouty horses assail you.

And you just smile. You can’t help it.

If the powertrain is a hoot, the handling is still a mystery. A one-off, designed to thrill the natives at the world’s biggest GTI festival, it’s not quite kosher in some areas. We are told succinctly not to use full steering lock because the tyres foul the bodywork and might even tear some of it off. So we didn’t do that.

We flicked it left and right a few times (the hardest yaw rates we were allowed to attempt) and all seemed nicely tied down (but still too lightly helmed) and it even rode properly on its 20-inch custom boots.

Now, who wants one?

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