Yahoo Autos VW's MK4 GTI Is the Imperfect Hot Hatch Superstar
The year is 2002, Y2K hysteria has passed, and Alicia Keys, Avril Lavigne, and Ashanti are among those competing for the top spots on Billboard's year-end chart. Tens of thousands of MK4-era Golfs, GTIs, and Jettas are freshly rolling through American streets. MK4 production had started five years prior, and its reputation of servicing nightmares and cracking interiors hadn't yet developed among owners.
Introduced in 1997, the MK4 generation of Volkswagen Golf was a revelation, preparing the Wolfsburg-based company to embrace the 21st century with modern designs, technological advancement, and a continuing focus on fun. With three generations of GTI hot hatch production behind it, Volkswagen shed the Golf's square silhouette for a smoother and tighter design with the MK4 GTI. A design that has since grown into a sort of timeless cool. It played the dual role of a sophisticated and sporty daily driver, as well as a European entrant to the then-raging tuner community. VW cast a wide net and landed a bountiful consumer catch with the MK4 GTI.
By 2001, the MK4 Golf platform was the best-selling car in Europe and rolling off production lines across Europe, China, Mexico, and Brazil by the tens of thousands. By all accounts, the new chassis and its accompanying 1.8-liter turbocharged inline-four and VR6 powerplants were a full-stop success. In the January 1999 edition of Road & Track, Andrew Bornhop wrote that the new generation of Golf's driving manners reflected a move upmarket and that the Golf family were proper driver's cars.
"The Golf and Jetta impress with their smooth ride, their effective sound isolation and their ability to track true and relaxed for sustained periods of time on the Autobahn at speeds around 100 mph," Bornhop wrote in his first drive of the new generation Volkswagen. "And when the cars are tossed into a corner with verve, they still respond well and lift their inside rear tires as Golfs and Jettas have always done."
But the following decades haven't been as kind to the paradigm-shifting hatchback. Finicky electronics, awkward and labor-intensive engine repairs, and an overreliance on hard and prone-to-cracking plastics have faded the MK4's appeal. As a value proposition, they're generally more pain than they're worth, but the poor reputation that precedes Volkswagen's MK4 generation is inflated. At least that's how it feels after a proper German drive in a road-warrior version from the Volkswagen Classic collection.
With 153,000 clicks on the LCD-dotted odometer, the Flash-red 25th-anniversary-edition GTI hasn't lived inside a museum for two decades. No, its three-spoke, perforated leather steering wheel had shed its black dye onto the hands of its drivers along the way. The six-speed manual transmission was agreeable enough, but its golf-ball adorned shifter provided no mechanical satisfaction in its use, placing it from gear to gear without as much as a click of acknowledgment. The dash creaked, and I was especially weary of the notorious brittle door card, inspiring my best efforts at being gentle when pulling the door latch inside.
That confirms suspicions that the MK4 GTI isn't perfect. But get behind the wheel of one before casting a monolithic view on the 20-year-old hatches. Running from the Frankfurt Airport to the Nürburgring on a route so out of the way it couldn't even be called the scenic route, the banks of the Rhine River were sounded by a whistling turbocharger and skipping front tires. The MK4 example I was driving wasn't just special for its protruding lip and extra undercarriage. Powered by a 1.8-liter turbocharged inline-four, the 25th-anniversary GTI puts down 180 hp and 174 lb-ft of torque, notably fed through a then-new-for-2002 six-speed-manual transmission and a shifter out of the Audi TT. Adorned with 18-inch BBS wheels, stiffer rubber bushings, and larger brakes, Volkswagen's homage to its own hot hatch heritage isn't just enjoyable to look at, it brings a smile as I increase pressure on the aluminum-brushed accelerator pedal.
The specifications don't really matter, ultimately, nor do they stack up in any meaningful way to the admittedly dwindling segment of modern hot hatches. Instead, it's the little indications of an era of feedback not totally gone but close to extinct. Launch off a stoplight in first gear and the presence of body-shaking wheel hop is soon joined by a hint of front-wheel directional freedom. It's a teenaged maneuver that even the most mature of adults would be tempted to engage in every once in a while. Even with a gearing trick maneuver involving two separate final drives (3.88 ratio for first through fourth gear and a 3.10 ratio for fifth and sixth), unleashing all 180 horses is only seat-leaning at city speeds or for a launching highway merge. Likewise, the true and revered presence of hydraulic power steering is a charming part of the MK4 GTI in modern times, requiring an additional half helping of lock to exit the roundabout but with excellent on-center response at highway speeds.
Significant complaints from the era still remain in 2024. Entering a lightly sweeping but radius-increasing bend upward of 80 mph, the unkind presence of lift appears, wallowing out the turn-in and leaving me with a mushy wheel in my hands. As our own editor-in-chief, Daniel Pund, noted in a 2002 Car and Driver hot hatch comparison, "You arrive slow into the curves, the horizon tilts several degrees, then you ride out on a swell of torque—not fluidly." Riding on a torsion-beam rear-axle setup, the MK4 GTI wasn't the most sophisticated in its class, as the consensus of the 2002 test centered on the GTI's untidy handling behavior.
Driving the MK4 GTI as intended, through metropolises and then out onto the twisting roads available to you, is a great reminder of why the GTI at large has been (arguably) the practical enthusiast pick for decades now. It provides a surging torque curve and is as fun in the sonic department as period-correct versions of Subaru's WRX, whistling and spurting the song of forced induction across the revolution range. The pedals are spaced tight enough to allow for my rather petite feet to heel-and-toe but not so close that big-footed friends would struggle with pedal jumbling. Even in two-door guise, fitting four adults in the cabin wouldn't be so intimate, and the sound deadening works as installed a few decades later too. There are remnants of old here, but the ultimate MK4 driving experience was at least miles beyond its predecessors.
And if you have a masochistic fetish for loose Torx bits and replacing broken plastic clips, here's your car.
This isn't a recommendation to go out and buy a MK4 GTI. In fact, I can't in good faith even insinuate that owning a MK4 would be pleasant (particularly in light of the rough lives most MK4s have lived). Soon enough, the relics of early-aughts hot hatches will be relegated to picking-parts cars at the junkyard, but until the last crayon-smelling chassis is forklifted away, it's still worthwhile to nod at the MK4 for all it accomplished.
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