The 3G Ramblings & General Discussion Thread (ʎluO sɹǝsoo7)
10-23-2020, 10:41 AM
#1762
Senior Moderator
My middle name is Jesus
10-23-2020, 12:22 PM
#1763
Senior Moderator
10-23-2020, 01:39 PM
#1765
Senior Moderator
10-23-2020, 02:28 PM
#1766
Senior Moderator
Ching chinga chong chong chong ching ching wong!
10-23-2020, 02:29 PM
#1767
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<gong sound>
10-26-2020, 09:04 AM
#1768
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Sun time.
10-26-2020, 10:52 AM
#1769
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10-26-2020, 10:55 AM
#1770
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no work today for me 
The following users liked this post:
Yumcha (10-26-2020)
10-26-2020, 11:06 AM
#1771
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Last Friday was pretty nice. Weather cooled off a bit, I wrapped up work a little early, went and voted against fascism, sprung WagonJr from school a little early to take a family beach afternoon. Sat out a brief rainstorm in the truck on the beach, and popped a bottle of champagne and drank mimosas on the sand. White Trash to the max. Great day for collecting hermit crabs in the surf; let them all go after because I know that some had to have been Crabman's cousins.
Then did somehoney-do asshole-do projects around the house this weekend, modifying the beehive screens and cleaning up beach stuff. Yesterday I replaced all the HVAC vents and smoke detectors in the house. Had planned to do that room by room as I repaint, but that shit's stalled out and taking forever and I got tired of seeing the boxes of parts sitting in the entryway waiting for me. Just knocked it out and freed up some floorspace again.
Watched the new Borat moviefilm. It was... a Borat moviefilm.
Back to "work" from the couch. Looking like a hell-week of meetings and briefings and shit.
Then did some
Watched the new Borat moviefilm. It was... a Borat moviefilm.
Back to "work" from the couch. Looking like a hell-week of meetings and briefings and shit.
10-26-2020, 11:14 AM
#1772
Senior Moderator
hopefully they're fun 'confidential' briefings..
also hope you are in your briefs during aforementioned briefings because..
also hope you are in your briefs during aforementioned briefings because..
10-26-2020, 11:21 AM
#1773
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Well yeah, I'm working from home... So it's a pretty formal meeting if I manage to put on underwear.
10-26-2020, 11:31 AM
#1774
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10-26-2020, 01:58 PM
#1777
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Honestly, I probably couldn't care less about a Jetta.
So yeah, please post it!
So yeah, please post it!
10-26-2020, 01:59 PM
#1778
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Show us your big long one. We'll judge it for quantity AND quality.
10-26-2020, 02:06 PM
#1779
Super Happy Fun Red GLI
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
The following 2 users liked this post by Catzilla:
justnspace (10-26-2020),
rockstar143 (10-26-2020)
10-26-2020, 02:39 PM
#1781
Super Happy Fun Red GLI
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
10-26-2020, 02:42 PM
#1782
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Join Date: Aug 2014
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Here you go:
Super Happy Fun Red GLI
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
Alternate titles: "GLI: Grandma's Little Indulgence"
"The Ultimate Driving Appliance"
"Das Fahrvergnügen Generator"
"Catzilla's Very Red VAG"
This 2016 Volkswagen Jetta GLI SEL DSG VAG BMF BFF OPP OMG WTF BBQ JEC in Tornado Red was sold new by Hiley Volkswagen in Arlington, TX, to a local customer as a present to his wife. She adorned it with a TCU Grandparents sticker on the rear window and a fish emblem on the trunk. Alas, during her last years she was only able to rack up 18,800 miles on this gorgeous fuck-me-red-lipstick GLI before passing from this life. I like to think that in addition to the usual old lady puttering around, some of those miles were spirited jaunts down Texas' long freeways. The car sat unused for some time, before the elderly widower traded it back in to Hiley for a nice used Jeep. Hiley posted it for sale a week or so before I sold my beautiful but tired Kinetic Blue Pearl Acura TL Type S for near my asking price within hours of posting it up in on Farcebook, the Monday after a weekend of 20+ hours of hard detailing.
I test drove the little red rocket GLI, in light rain and light freeway traffic, and got an outstanding first impression. We sat to parley and they brought out a hardcopy of the Autocheck report. I saw that there were multiple entries for service, including some that said, "electrical service" and were only months apart. I was then escorted to the service center, where the service manager pulled up the detailed records in their system, to find that those were all navigation software updates except one for an interior light bulb. The service manager chuckled and pointed to the employee number of that entry. "That's me," he said. We then dug into the last entry on the Autocheck report, a 1-line entry "Engine Service ." The service records showed it had come in on a tow truck with a broken serpentine belt, covered under warranty of course. This was just this past August so I suspect it had sat in a hot garage too long, something that no German car is engineered for.
Once Hiley's detailers had completely removed the adhesive ghosts of the TCU Grandparents sticker and fish emblem I bought the car, for keeps. Long-term loan and long-term warranty. The Sentra SER Spec-V was too small. The TL Type S was too big. This Mk6 Jetta GLI is just right.
I had been very interested in one of these cars after a week with the 2nd best rental car I ever had, a Canadian market Mk6 Jetta in economic yet fun 1.4t Wolfsburg Edition trim - 2017, wasn't even available in the U.S. The chassis dynamics, ergonomics, and really damn good electric-assist steering quite impressed me. It felt large and roomy inside, yet slim and nimble to drive - and had cheekily confident poise on the freeway. "Hmmm," I thunked at the time, "With more motor, tires, brakes, and suspension tuning - plus a bit of stylish aero body enhancements, as you do - this folk's-wagen would be incredible." I was right, and I shall deliver the details why.
1. Power & it's delivery. The Gen 3 VAG 2.0 4-banger with smol hair dryer is rated at 210 horsepoops. I think this feels a bit low, for the chassis isn't featherweight but the hardness level of the GLI's pull seems suspiciously fierce to me - though perhaps my inexperience with turbo cars is showing. Not quite the heavy steamroller torque hit from roll of the J35 V6 in the Type S but still way faster than the average econobox. It's very talkative, with odd chuffs and growls at low speeds and a thick rumbling sustained fart under acceleration. Keep your foot out of it and the behavior is perfectly suited to Grandma - cautious, hesitant, slooooowwwww. Put your foot into it and the hair dryer spools up to deliver copious forward thrust, leading to quickly borken speed limits. At this point I'm perfectly happy with it bone-stock, but rumors of APR tunes with optional powertrain warranty that bump power and improve the DSG's shift points do percolate my interdasts. The DSG itself is the best shiftable automatic transmission I have ever driven. The fact that the paddles are always active and ready for quick flick downshifts is always pleasing to me. The shifts themselves are much faster than a true manual trans, and once you let off the go-pedal and stop flicking the paddles it waits a few seconds and then seamlessly reverts back to full auto. It also will not allow over-rev or bogging down. It's immeasurably superior to the fragile, poorly geared, and slow AF paddle-mode-required 5at in my ex-Type S, though I do miss the purity of rowing my own gears with the true man-trans' I have had in my dearly departed Sentra SER Spec-V, 325is, D21 Hardbody 4x4, Z31 300ZX, FC RX-7, FB RX-7, MkII Supra, Cavalier, rare 4-on-the-floor Aspen, Sunbird, 4th gen Civic Si, GLC, and Scirocco.
2. Steering. I am old enough to remember when the automotive magazine writers poo-poohed the fancy new-fangled hydraulic steering assist as being inferior in road feel to the good ol' fashioned no power steering that "proper" sports cars should have. Before we laugh at that, recall that none other than the legendary Aryton Senna insisted that Honda had to make the early NSX's steering unassisted - and they listened. Some years later in a tight little '85 Mazda RX-7 I would come to appreciate that sentiment as it's ancient unassisted recirculating ball steering was such a precise telegraph of the road surface at speed. However my next RX-7, a 1990 GTU trim of the legendary FC generation, had hydraulic assist on it's rack-and-pinion-of-perfection steering system and it was enlighteningly better. Lately the motor-pundits have bemoaned the fading away of the now-classic hydraulic racks in favor of the modern electric-assist rack & pinion systems that the OEMs are building. Those guys need to drive this car, for it is a top-notch application of this new technology. In the first week of ownership I found I could easily identify certain sections of local freeway by the complex multi-tonal frequencies the tires and steering wheel sing to me. The road feel is a full-color 3D real-time texture map compared to the RX-7's vintage telegraph. I have discovered some interesting surface defects in roads I thought I knew well, small dips and imperfections that I hadn't noticed in other cars. The steering is firm on-center with zero play but always ready to cut left or right, and that cut do be sharp, clean, and communicative. It's not quite on the analog razor level of a good BMW, Porsche or Mazda hydraulic rack, especially at very low parking-lot speeds where it feels distinctly more artificial - but overall the tuning of this electro-system is quite finely honed for it's application in this, the top-dog version of a mass-market economy car.
3. Grip. The handling is what makes or breaks a car for me, ever since my father horribly abused me by teaching me drive in a 1982 Ford F150 equipped with suspension technology developed on horse-drawn wagons and perfected on steam engines. The GLI's much more modern multi-link bouncy bits are tuned to just two blonde hairs below painful on Dallas's narrow paths of broken wasteland that I must traverse to my place of employment. The payoff is that this hot little econo-3-box has serious cornering chops and I've not even been close to it's limits yet. It is not as neutral as I'd like but the traction control seems quite talented at reigning in the understeer of post-apex acceleration and regaining the line with very little loss of speed. The car came with the factory original 225/40R18 Bridgestone Potenzas RE97AS on it's stock 18x8 Mallory wheels, and all four were showing tiny cracking at the edges from long still exposure to Texas summer heat. Apparently they passed the CPO inspection's tread depth and 6 year age limit but I got cold-feety until they shaved the car's price down to cover a new set and also repair the curb-hurt left rear wheel (more on that later...). With my newly equipped set of Potenza RE980AS I am starting to push it harder - and the Mk6 Jetta GLI is responding that it's quite capable and willing for some mischief. There is an interesting quirk concerning how the traction control interplays with torque steer: it doesn't fully eliminate that geometrically inescapable bane of all wrong-wheel-drive machines, instead it seems to work hard to make the front tires effectively grippier than other cars of this configuration under acceleration. You still have to have your FWD reflexes honed to dial in a bit of preventative counter-torque-steer, but the fronts will be a-grippin' and you will be a-grinnin' like a fool as you rocket straight forward.
4. Brakes. Whoa. Stop. Hammer-the-seatbelt-against-your-chest-time. I've had cars that could stop this quickly and more - I once flat-out stalled my FC RX-7 from 60mph in what felt like 12 feet to miss a deer - but never combined with this extremely nuanced braking feel. This more than anything makes me pine for living next door to the Sierra Nevada mountains where one can fully explore the balancing act of trail braking a FWD car deep, deep, deep into dicey blind curves. The feel of the GLI's factory-stock stoppers is not just progressive, firm, and highly effective at rapid reduction of velocity, it also harmonizes with the excellent steering feel to provide wonderfully communicative braking feedback. You can really modulate the braking to quite a fine degree. Living in a mass population center that daily and nightly provides dashcam video entertainment of people fucking up on the roads, you have to be good at braking just the right amount and the GLI has the tools to nail it. These brakes are so flippin' good I fully plan to replace them with only stock VW pads & rotors as they wear.
5. Interior: The ergonomics are what makes or breaks a car for me, after my father once horribly abused me by making me drive his short-cab '88 Ford Ranger for a while when I was young and my girlfriend lived an hour away. More recently: the Sentra's sun visor cut off an inch of my upper windshield view and it's seat was tight. The TL's upper seat was excellent but the lower bolster too short. The GLI's well-bolstered black with red piping Leatherette(R) seats are perfectly matched to my lanky body and to my great joy the tilting & telescoping steering wheel adjusts to where I can put the seat back far enough for leg comfort and still maintain proper elbow angle. HVAC controls are simple large grippy knobs, radio volume is in the correct spot (unlike the wifey's Honda CR-V, ahem), and the Nav system is unobtrusive to my eyeballs. My very favorite thing is the keyless entry, ignition, and locking - though running a close second is the fact that this SEL trim of the GLI has an absolutely banging Fender stereo system whose sound is incredibly clear even at high speeds and maximum road noise. Win, win, win, win. However there's one glaring downside to the otherwise excellent small diameter, thick, and flat-bottomed steering wheel. The surface is a smooth hard artificial leather that makes my hands sweat somethin' awful. I just can't figure out how to get around this. I honestly miss the perforated leather wrap on the Type S's tiller and need to figure out how to get that surface onto this wheel. To Be Determined...
6. Exterior: Smart lights, as invented by Tucker. They move around, under command of the Komputer. I thought I was seeing things until I tested it in the driveway one night. Turn signal on, that side's headlight swivels that way. Turn the wheel while moving, even without signal, and it does it. I love it, and it may have saved the life of a black-shirted homeless junkie chick who stepped into my turn lane one night just as I was turning the wheel. Also, the styling, shape, and hue of the car in general are pleasing to me. It's streamlined flowing treatment of the classic small 3-box sedan has excellent lines, IMO, and the stock wheels are brightly hawt. Soon I will gloss-black out the chrome side strips and get some gloss black 5-spokes with a red Hot Wheels stripe (reference the Mk7 GLI 35th Anniversary edition wheels). I'm undecided on also blacking out the minimalist trunk lip spoiler for more contrast. A note about the Tornado Red - it's really very, very, red. After claybar & some Griot's ceramid wax this paint could not get more red without becoming actual volcano-fresh lava. It's beautiful.
7. Tech. Of note is some interesting technology that this machine employs to reduce risk of damage and reduce insurance premiums: radar. Front, rear, and side radar. The Komputer beeps stridently at me, getting louder as the sweet front splitter (2015+ facelift for the Mk6) approaches the parking block or the rear bumper approaches anything. It flashes little orange signs in the side mirrors when there's vehicle-shaped objects in the blind spots. I absolutely love this technology. The blind spot warning is especially noice because DFW drivers seem to love cruising along in the blind spots, and the front warning has already saved me from lip damage several times.
The Gesalt: I'm now exploring the subtle nuances of how the Komputer that manages these things adjusts the speed sensitive steering assist and how and when it kicks in the traction control - which is much less with new tires. I feel like this is an excellent way to learn the shape of the envelope and tune some muscle memory of controlling the GLI's motions. I'm reading the owner's manual (which is GLI-specific, predicting that the Mk7 GLI would be split off as a separate model from the pedestrian Jetta) and figuring out the tech of the Komputer. So far the GLI is everything I hoped and a bit more, and IMO is extremely well turned out both from the designers and builders in Mexico. The balance and cohesiveness of the GLI package really shine for each and every drive. This is kind of car you take the long way to the grocery store with, the way with some curves and on-ramps. And when you leave the grocery store you get the fun of arranging the mega-velcro cargo-holding system blocks to keep your stuff from getting bounced off the insides of the huge-ass trunk on the long way home.
Final Summary: This, the 32nd car I have had, is the nicest car I have ever had. If it gets wrecked, I will simply buy another one without even thinking about other cars (with the exception of maybe a Mk7 GLI...). It's that good.
Addendum: So the minute I walked up the the GLI on the dealership lot, my eyes were drawn to an ugly defect - the left rear wheel had tasted a curb and suffered clearcoat rash and a finger-width deep dent in the rim. I refused to accept this and the salesweasel dutifully wrote "repair damaged left rear wheel" onto the contract. A week later I dropped the car off and accepted a pretty blue Mk7 2020 Jetta base model with 12 miles on it as a loaner to beat on. The Mk7 chassis is much wider, longer, and surprisingly lighter than the Mk6 - but the base model's basic-transportation suspension & steering left me 'meh'. The next day I happily re-acquired my beautiful GLI with a wheel that appeared to be perfectly repaired - the paint match was spot on. However two weeks later I began a wash with some quick sprays of the expensive but totally worth it Meguir's Ultimate All Wheel cleaner, the stuff that chemically melts brake dust into a pretty amethyst foam to be washed away. I sprayed the repaired wheel first and the paint instantly went crackle-crackle. Yep, the wheel cleaner that is safe for all wheel coatings is not safe for cheap-ass clearcoat. Yep, I once again have to drop off the car and get a loaner. I bypassed the salesweasel and went right to his mgmt about this, and received reassurance that they would send the wheel out to a professional wheel repair place instead of the local yokel who welded well but clearcoated like shit.
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justnspace (10-26-2020)
10-26-2020, 02:42 PM
#1783
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Nobody better fix that; because of the indexes. 
10-26-2020, 02:42 PM
#1784
Just kidding, I did read...
there's no way you're not an automotive journalist by trade...
or you have such a great grasp of the English language you
have spent a lifetime talking down to people and correcting
Grahamer.
I can't believe how in love with the GLI you are...makes me wonder
how you'd feel after driving my B8.5 S4 with DSG and a pulley and tune.
there's no way you're not an automotive journalist by trade...
or you have such a great grasp of the English language you
have spent a lifetime talking down to people and correcting
Grahamer.
I can't believe how in love with the GLI you are...makes me wonder
how you'd feel after driving my B8.5 S4 with DSG and a pulley and tune.
10-26-2020, 02:43 PM
#1785
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He said he got a red rocket from gramma and he likes it. Something about curbing a wheel and she died. Also he's done this 32 times before.
10-26-2020, 02:48 PM
#1787
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I noticed it. It's probably the best thing on this whole page.
10-26-2020, 03:14 PM
#1788
Senior Moderator
What about the Odyssey?
10-26-2020, 05:26 PM
#1789
Senior Moderator
the sunshade is pretty sweet...
10-26-2020, 06:15 PM
#1790
B8.4 S4 w/tune: I would spooge in my pantaloons, tbh.
Tacoma: neighbor works in mortgage industry, is making bank x9000, they gave him $4k and a tug job for trade-in value for his nice Tundra when he bought the 12k mile Taco like 3 days after I got the GLI. It came with a Go-Pro mount WTF? I think he paid $31k for it.
Oddessey: that lady grew up in that house in the 70s/80s, inherited it, gutted it, rebuilt it, and has two insane chihuahua fluff-dog mixes.
Sunshade: $28 at VW dealer, fits perfect, drastically reduces interior temps.
Tacoma: neighbor works in mortgage industry, is making bank x9000, they gave him $4k and a tug job for trade-in value for his nice Tundra when he bought the 12k mile Taco like 3 days after I got the GLI. It came with a Go-Pro mount WTF? I think he paid $31k for it.
Oddessey: that lady grew up in that house in the 70s/80s, inherited it, gutted it, rebuilt it, and has two insane chihuahua fluff-dog mixes.
Sunshade: $28 at VW dealer, fits perfect, drastically reduces interior temps.
10-26-2020, 06:18 PM
#1791
Not an automobile journalist, that industry is dying.
I like to write. I have a bunch of unfinished sci-fi, really need to work on that. I re-read Dune recently and was humbled and inspired by actual good writing.
I like to write. I have a bunch of unfinished sci-fi, really need to work on that. I re-read Dune recently and was humbled and inspired by actual good writing.
10-26-2020, 06:25 PM
#1793
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Damn. Mystery Meat would jizz hisself if he saw that wheel cleaner working like that.
10-26-2020, 06:54 PM
#1794
Senior Moderator
OEM GDM stuff
10-26-2020, 08:01 PM
#1796
Last Friday was pretty nice. Weather cooled off a bit, I wrapped up work a little early, went and voted against fascism, sprung WagonJr from school a little early to take a family beach afternoon. Sat out a brief rainstorm in the truck on the beach, and popped a bottle of champagne and drank mimosas on the sand. White Trash to the max. Great day for collecting hermit crabs in the surf; let them all go after because I know that some had to have been Crabman's cousins.
Then did somehoney-do asshole-do projects around the house this weekend, modifying the beehive screens and cleaning up beach stuff. Yesterday I replaced all the HVAC vents and smoke detectors in the house. Had planned to do that room by room as I repaint, but that shit's stalled out and taking forever and I got tired of seeing the boxes of parts sitting in the entryway waiting for me. Just knocked it out and freed up some floorspace again.
Watched the new Borat moviefilm. It was... a Borat moviefilm.
Back to "work" from the couch. Looking like a hell-week of meetings and briefings and shit.
Then did some
Watched the new Borat moviefilm. It was... a Borat moviefilm.
Back to "work" from the couch. Looking like a hell-week of meetings and briefings and shit.
I kept thinking...this is funny, right? But it's been done before...but yeah there was some funny shit.
Good job about the self imposed Honey-STFU I'll get to it list...
I do the same shit.
