On the road: VW Golf GTE - car review
'The emissions are roughly what you'd emit smoking a cigar. A cigar made of coal'Everything's easy once you're used to it, so I try not to mention how long I normally spend figuring out the touch screen in cars, even though that accounts for roughly a third of my life. The Golf GTE (Gran Turismo Electricity) is brilliantly intuitive. Its technology is remarkable and it has five operating modes: pure electric, electric plus, battery hold, battery charge and auto hybrid. If they hadn't managed to mask all that and make it easy to use, I would still be sitting in the car right now, waiting to move.
The battery life display is a bit boastful and unrealistic, constantly claiming 16 miles and going six, though obviously that doesn't matter in a hybrid that you can just switch to battery charge (unlike next week: a little electric-car cliffhanger for you there). This exaggeration - the claimed combined cycle is a preposterous 166mpg, which I didn't get anywhere near - is softened by ridiculous riders telling you that you make your own bed with your "driving style, speed, use of additional electrical consuming equipment, outside temperature, number of people in the car, driving style selection and topology". What they really mean to say is, "There must be a way to guesstimate hybrid range, but we don't yet know it."
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