I was expecting the 2023 Golf Life Wagon to be little more than a sensible car. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with sensible, but you have to admit that it’s a word which can be interchanged quite seamlessly with ‘boring’.
And on appearances alone, the Volkswagen Golf Life is a bit boring. The long sedan shape with its bulky boot has none of the boxy charm of the ubiquitous hatchback model. I would personally rate its sex appeal as somewhere between that of a filing cabinet drawer and a pencil sharpener.
But there’s a reason we’ve been told since childhood not to judge a book by its cover. The second you sit in the driver’s seat, the Golf Life is fun. From the customisable interior lighting to the smooth and zippy drive, I was quickly won over.
What made this all the more enjoyable was that I didn’t expect it. The entire experience felt a bit like running into your tax accountant at an underground rave.
Who’d have thought the Golf knew how to party?
Sitting in this car for the first time is really a pleasant surprise. Gone are bulky gearsticks, in the Golf they’ve been replaced by what I affectionately referred to as a ‘driving nubbin’ – a small thumb-like protrusion which satisfyingly snapped the car into park, reverse and drive. Unsurprisingly in 2023 there are no physical parking breaks you crank up or keyed ignition, they’ve both been replaced with a switch and button respectively.
There are two high-resolution screens in this car. The 10-inch touch-screen centre consol and another 10.25 inch screen behind the steering wheel. Your speed is shown on a digital speedometer (which I found difficult to interpret to the point of uselessness) along with the precise speed represented with a digital number.
But while I’m one of the people who doesn’t mind cars drifting ever-closer to being iPads on wheels, there are a couple points where the screen integration has too much control over the car’s functionality. Personally, I prefer physical buttons or knobs for some of the most basic climate controls. But in the Golf Life, everything except the temperature, must be managed from the centre consol’s menu.
I can’t help but question both the safety and practicality of having to navigate into a screen’s submenu to de-fog your car’s windscreen. Clicking through menus is annoying when you’re stuck in traffic, downright dangerous if you’re rocketing down a freeway at night. While The car does respond to simple voice commands like “warm my feet”, if I had passengers with me frankly I’d rather be cold.
Volkswagen have announced that physical buttons will be reintroduced in later models, but Australia won’t see those changes until at least 2024.
Though some things are perhaps too futuristic in this car, others are stuck firmly in the past. The seats in the Golf Life car are comfortable enough, but look like they’re taken straight out of whatever sedan your mum was driving in the 1990s. You’ll find no heating or clever mechanics here, just a physical wheel for seatback adjustment and the usual levers for height and placement.
Of course, if you’re looking at the Golf Life Wagon instead of its stubbier counterpart, you’re interested in the boot size. With the seats up, it’s 61 litres. Pull a couple of tabs in the back and the seats will neatly fold down with no friction and increase the space to a very impressive 1643 litres. More than enough space for a big grocery shop, camping holiday or moderately restrained Ikea visit.
And if you’ve grown tired of the exhausting physical labour of slamming your own boot shut, strain your shoulders no longer. Yet another button will gently bring the boot to close.
If you think I’m someone who is easily bought off by cheap trinkets, like coloured lighting trim and big touch screens, you’re right. But thankfully the car’s drive lived up to its interior’s flashy promise.
The word I kept coming back to is zippy. Having spent most my adult life driving turbo-engine cars with the affiliated lag, it was a pleasure to press the accelerator and feel this car shoot away. As a predominately city driver, I was quickly weaving through traffic with joyful abandon. It was easy to forget that the Golf Life Wagon is quite a long car, it felt much sportier than it looks.
This is in part due to the Volkswagen Group’s proprietary TSI – or ‘turbocharged stratified injected’ – engine. It’s not a new innovation – they’ve been in VW’s cars since 2005 – but it does improve performance. Without getting too caught up in the technical nitty gritty, TSI cars are inspired by the functionality of diesel engines. That means they’re better with fuel economy and have higher torque and horsepower for comparatively-sized petrol engines.
There’s also plenty of smart tech that will help keep you on the road no matter what your driving style is.
You get autonomous emergency braking which will also detect pedestrians and cyclists, driver fatigue monitoring, front and rear cross-traffic alert, and blind-spot monitoring which is delivered in the form of a flashing light on your rear-vision mirrors.
If you’re drifting out of your lane, the car will reproachfully correct your trajectory. If you don’t like the feeling of your car taking the wheel, you can customise this – and many of the safety settings – in the centre consol menu.
As someone who lives in one of the most competitive places in Australia to park (Bondi Beach) I was particularly excited to trial the park assist function. But let me tell you, this was not the place to test this technology.
Park assist mode can be used when you’re travelling at 40km or below. The car then scans for possible parking places, creating a virtual interpretation of the road on the centre screen. When it spots one, you press a button on the screen, keep your foot on the break for a moment or two and then the car will take control of the steering wheel while the driver monitors the break and accelerator. It’s a bit fiddly and not terribly intuitive.
Perhaps in another universe, where parking is a meditative and gentle process, this system would be fine. But in Sydney’s east parking is a blood sport. If you don’t scream into a spot like you’re a stunt driver from Tokyo Drift (and sometimes even when you do) you’ll be deafened with honking horns from three blocks away. In these – admittedly hostile – conditions park assist process was far too slow and cumbersome to be useful.
If you do use the park function, employ some common sense. When I did find a quiet parking station for another attempt, it failed to prompt me to put the car into drive after the reversing. If I had complicitly trusted the car’s instruction, I would have traded paint with the far more expensive Porsche Cayenne I was manoeuvring next to.
Even with these little imperfections, the Golf Life Wagon TSI is a surprisingly fun car packed with features which you’d have to be pretty numb not to enjoy on some level or another.
But it does come in at a rather hefty $39,490 price tag. That puts this car in the same ballpark as some of Australia’s most popular SUVs, including the the Toyota Rav4 (starting price $36,550), Mazda CX-5 (starting price $31,390) and Mitsubishi outlander (starting price $34,490).
But if you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy the ubiquitous SUV shape – but does like to pack their car full of stuff – the Golf Life Wagon will likely tick your boxes.
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