Diary: so we bought a car ..

On Sunday I wrote about the somewhat fraught car-buying process. Yesterday was devoted to test drives, ending up with our choosing the Volkswagen Golf SV GTI.

VW Golf SV GTI

The Skoda Karoq was fun in a big, squishy van kind of way but in the end the sleeker hatchback from VW won us around. The SV variant of the Golf has plenty of room in the back.

As I drove around south Bristol with the VW salesman in the back, I had the opportunity to floor the pedal. (Our preferred choice is the automatic). The engine seemed to step back a moment through the change-down .. and then the Golf surged forwarded with a shove in the back. I half turned to him and said, "I guess this is what it feels like when the Shuttle launches!"

Sanity prevailed as we chose the 130 bhp rather than the 150. It's enough.

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The VW operation in general seemed more professional and process-oriented than the rather haphazard Skoda/Seat dealership. Our particular experience was marred, however, by a 40 minutes wait for service as the collective intelligence of the sales team had forgotten who had seen us on our first visit Friday.

Thanks again to WhatCar. Its target pricing allowed us to negotiate down from VW's inflated, premium-markup list pricing.

Now we wait until October/November for the factory order to come through.

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PS: at no point in the proceedings did any salesperson mention electric car options to us. Despite the hype, it's nowhere in the salesrooms.

The general take on 'Driver Assist' is that it's a combination of useful (parking sensors, cruise control), marginal (cameras, lane holding) and gimmicky (auto-drive in slow-moving traffic, traffic sign recognition, self-parking). So much for the hype on the imminence of self-driving cars.