For Volkswagen the Paris Motor Show is all about the redesigned seventh-generation Golf. As always it will have many different variants – one of them being the 2014 Volkswagen Golf BlueMotion. Billed as a “concept” (like the GTI), it is harbinger of the production model to come next year. We’ll start with the headline figure.
How does 73.5 mpg fuel economy sound to you? It sounds good to us, and we’d imagine that it does to a whole lot of other people out there too. If you’re in the United States though, forget that you read that – because you probably can’t have it. VW arrives at that using its expertise in diesel engines combined with a myriad of technologies.
What the Golf BlueMotion does have is a 1.6-liter TDI four-cylinder that makes an impressive (in this application, with these fuel economy figures) 108 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque. That sounds respectable to us. It is run by a stop/start system with battery regeneration . Aerodynamics have been improved thanks to things like a lower ride height, smoother underbody panels, closed off air intakes, reworked brake channels and a C-pillar spoiler (to name a few improvements). Reductions in weight over the previous car help to give it a 15-percent improvement in efficiency.
To give you an idea of just how efficient the Golf BlueMotion is, VW calculated that if you drove only 9,300 miles a year, you would have to visit the gas station just 10 times. Now most of us drive far more than that, and you’re not likely to get 73.5 mpg all the time, but it is still a stunner. That’s because the car has a 13.2 gallon tank. Last time, BlueMotion was a standalone model available. This time it is treated as more of a trim level, with Trendline and Comfortline option packages. We still can’t figure out why they won’t offer it as a three-door as well. Beyond that, what are they thinking not selling this in the United States?
