VW Scirocco R-Line 2.0-litre TDI 150 PS manual – car review

The first time I ever had a boyfriend with a car, it was a VW Scirocco: low, square and noisy (the car was cool as well). In the 1990s, people had Sciroccos as a kind of subtle joke. It was a sports car, but also a period piece – so it was no longer sporty, but it still thought it was. I don’t know who the joke was on – the car? The world? Yourself? – but it was definitely irony based.

So I never understood why VW brought it back, because, new (it was redesigned in 2008), it wasn’t funny. It was just sporty. Ah, but there it is: turns out that funny doesn’t add very much to the driving experience, whereas sporty really does.

The look is completely different. Everything that was previously square is now round, though it is deceptively low and surprisingly wide. There is a certain open-faced friendliness to the front-on look of this new model, which is the diametric opposite of the original. The interior is sleeker and younger than that of, say, a Passat, but it will be deeply familiar to VW loyalists. Maybe too familiar: if this is meant to be the daring version of more sober models, it could convey that much more strongly with visual cues like – well, I don’t know. I’m not a car designer. But I would have known them if I’d seen them. The seats are sculpted, which starts off weird but is actually very pleasing.

It’s a delightful drive: there is more oomph than you expect, it moves through the gears like a minnow, it takes everything effortlessly. It’s so responsive, like (I imagine) teaching a gifted child: the more you ask, the more it can instantly do. I started to anthropomorphise it, imagining its moods on a spectrum from lively to boisterous. It was surely only a matter of time before I started calling it “she”.

Initially, I thought of it as a classic city car for people who would have bought a Golf but wanted to kid themselves that they would once in a while need to get to 60mph in a short time. It’s not that: given its performance, this car is wasted on city driving. In traffic, it’s almost painful: you can feel its impatience, and also the pedals are set quite high for constant stop-starting. It has a cool energy-saving feature whereby the engine cuts automatically when you’re stationary in traffic. (This is actually rather common now. I wish I could stop being so surprised.)

Knowing I had this speed and grace at my disposal altered my driving style a bit: I started to race people off the lights and generally behave like a dick. Then I had a flash of unwanted insight into how I must appear to the outside, in my purple mid-price sports car, driving like a boy racer with the reaction times of someone recently roused from anaesthetic. The only plausible explanation for me being in this car is that I have bought it as an 18th birthday present for my spoiled son, and am driving it home while having a nervous breakdown. But inside my head, we look tremendous, the Scirocco and I.

Scirocco R-Line 2.0-litre TDI 150 PS 6spd manual

Price From £27,375 (as tested: £29,565)
Top speed 134mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.6 seconds
Combined fuel consumption 67.3mpg
CO₂ emissions 109g/km
Eco rating 6/10
Cool rating 7/10