The 2016 Volkswagen Golf Sportwagen – which was previously known as the Jetta Sportwagen – may no longer come with a diesel, but it still comes with the company’s excellent 1.8-liter turbocharged gasoline engine. So how does it fare at a mile above sea level?
The TSI engine is rated at 170 horsepower, but at high elevation, all cars lose some horsepower, so it’s not pumping out all those horses on TFL’s home turf. In this particular Sportwagen, the engine is mated to a 5-speed manual transmission. Now that may seem a little anachronistic, but Nathan Adlen, who tested the car, said that it is well matched to the engine.
TFL did a 0-60 test of the diesel version of the Sportwagen a while back, and it could only muster about a 10.5 second run to 60 mph at elevation. That car also had the dual-clutch automatic transmission.
So how fast can Nathan wrangle the 5-speed VW up to 60 mph? And how much faster is it than the diesel? Watch the full TFLnow video above to find out.
And make sure to check out and subscribe to TFL’s newest YouTube channel called TFLnow. This new channel will be home to all the extra videos that don’t quite fit on our regular TFLcar and TFLtruck channels, like the 0-60 video above and also behind-the-scenes videos. It will also be home to live broadcasts soon, so make sure you click the link and subscribe.
