On Sunday, June 9, 2013
Volkswagen Polo GT TSI
With auto makers in India having slowly killed off their hot hatchbacks over the years, is the Volkswagen Polo GT TSI the car every performance hungry petrol head in the country been waiting for?
The term “hot hatch” is pretty much ingrained into Volkswagen’s DNA ever since the mid-1970s when the Golf GTI showed the world how ‘fun to drive’ and ‘affordable’ weren’t mutually exclusive. Since then, a lot of European auto manufacturers have had plenty of such hot hatches in their product portfolios and even today, Volkswagen pretty much leads this charge with hot versions of the Golf, Scirocco and Polo setting new benchmarks in the segment in the European market. So, back in 2009, when VW had announced that the Polo was coming to India, expectations were naturally high, and when the rumour mill started talking about the car coming in with a 1.2-litre engine, auto enthusiasts throughout the country (us included) were doing cartwheels in anticipation of the 105 PS TSI mill.
Sadly though, while we got the said capacity, what it ended up being was a slightly weedy naturally aspirated 3-cylinder motor with nowhere close to that power output. Thankfully, a little while later, we did get that much promised 105PS in the form of the 1.6-litre Polo and boy, did we love it. But as is the nature of such things, the only performance hatchback left in the Indian market, the 1.6 Polo, was killed off some time back and it seemed like hatches were back to being the affordable, practical beasts of burden that car buyers in general always perceived them to be. Until now that is…
Sadly though, while we got the said capacity, what it ended up being was a slightly weedy naturally aspirated 3-cylinder motor with nowhere close to that power output. Thankfully, a little while later, we did get that much promised 105PS in the form of the 1.6-litre Polo and boy, did we love it. But as is the nature of such things, the only performance hatchback left in the Indian market, the 1.6 Polo, was killed off some time back and it seemed like hatches were back to being the affordable, practical beasts of burden that car buyers in general always perceived them to be. Until now that is…
It looks like Volkswagen heard the collective cry of all motoring enthusiasts in the country and finally brought us the car we’ve been pining for all this while, or has it? Called the Polo GT TSI, this new car packs the company’s award-winning 1.2-litre TSI motor (that’s Turbocharged Stratified Injection for all the technology geeks out there, but more on that later) making 105PS of power coupled with a 7-speed twin clutch transmission, making it the most technologically advanced hatchback available in the country at the moment. So what does this mean? Has it reclaimed the crown of India’s hottest hatch? Well, let’s take a closer look.
