I recently went with a friend who was taking delivery of this King's Red GTI. Beautiful color, I much prefer it to the discontinued Tornado Red. This car is a manual in the Autobahn trim with the 19" inch wheel and sunroof package, although the wheels in the picture are 18" with winter tires. So we drove straight from the dealer to get Weathertech floor liners with my friend driving on the way out. On the way back I drove the car and got a great feel for an 8th gen manual vs my 7.5 gen DSG. It was mostly highway but with some city streets thrown in.
My first impression is how much smoother the engine sounds, huge improvements in engine NVH vs the 7.5 gen. Whether this is due to sound insulation, better engine mounting points or re-worked engine architecture I can't say, but both at idle as well as upto the 3000 rpm mark, the engine sounds so much better than the 7.5 gen. i did go beyond a third of the throttle nor rev it beyond 3000 rpm as the car had only 39 km on the odometer!! And of course the manual is so much more satisfying to drive, although purely from a speed maintenance and acceleration viewpoint the DSG is superior.
And as far as the elephant in the room is concerned, my only interaction with the touch screen was to adjust the temperature and fan speed, not when I was driving but as the passenger while my friend drove. And it was not bad, it did not take long for me to figure it out, fairly intuitive, although this was the very first time that I had interacted with that touchscreen. Anyway, I will be in regular touch with my friend to see how he adapts to this
GTI touchscreen, specially interesting as he is transitioning from a Mk 6 Golf which is all analogue.
