Golf GTI

From that angle it looks a little like a minivan, and parking it in the same driveway as a Miata does nothing to dissuade that…

Because the GTI will reside here in the Portland Metro area, it needed to be run through a DEQ inspection. If the car were 4 years old or newer (which we just missed), it would be exempt from testing. The test consists of plugging in a cable to the OBDII socket and reading the fuel mixture. So yesterday I drove to the closest testing station in Gresham. I was in line behind an old Chevy Suburban, and they had to run a sniffer up its tailpipe. And from what I could see, they didn’t pass. The Golf did pass as expected.

Afterwards I stopped into PDX Wraps to set up a day to have the car wrapped in green. I’ve decided to go different from the Avery Dark Green; it looks good, but I wanted something a bit…more. I picked out something from 3M, a Gloss Green Envy. If you google images of that, you’ll get some photos that seem way too light and bright, but I took their sample outside to hold it up to the car in shade and sunlight, and I loved the results. Maybe it just photographs overbright in direct sunlight. Here is a good look at the color, both inside and outside, on a Porsche Cayman GT4:

Their first opening wasn’t until November 10th, which was fine, except I’ll be gone. I won’t be back until early December, so right now I’m scheduled in on December 15th.

Discovered a MODE button, and as you can probably guess, I found the Sport Mode. It might just be the placebo effect, but the exhaust note got a touch louder, and the throttle pedal mapping changed so that the car felt quicker, win-win.

The car didn’t come with an owner’s manual, so I headed over to VW.com to see if I could download one. I had to enter the VIN so I knew that I’d find what I wanted. When I got to the end of the process and clicked on the button, I got a small pop-up saying, “Oops, we can’t find that; call our Customer Support Team.” Thinking maybe it was because I didn’t have an account, I entered all the information, agreed to all the whatevers, and asked for the manual again; same results.

The next step was to search for it, hoping that a VW Golf enthusiast site might have a copy. I found a Reddit thread that led me to www.carmans.net/. Bingo. A PDF of the manual. I asked for 2020, and this is what I got. I went back and asked for the 2019 version; I got the same 2021 version. Probably only store the ones that apply to model years that are the same.

The first thing I had to figure out was how do you open the hatch. I didn’t see a button on the dash anywhere, so I hit the button of the remote that had the standard icon on it. Nothing happened. I unlocked all the doors and hit the button again; still nothing. Found the section about the hatch in the manual and discovered that that button just unlocked it, and to open the hatch, you push on the VW logo, and it swivels out so you can grab and pull. I was expecting the key button to pop it up (or out) so you could grab an edge and lift.

I found out how to change the “Driver 1” welcome when you start up the car; it now says “Brian.” Hitting the Unlock button on the fob now opens all four doors. Also in the settings was the ability to adjust the rain-sensing range of the automatic wipers. I didn’t know I had them because the stalk icons were decidedly not the Japanese standard I’m used to.