2017 Volkswagen Golf GTI

This is the facelifted version of the seventh-generation Volkswagen Golf GTI. VW's European outright sales champion hatchback, the Golf has just received new styling, new engines, new-to-segment in-car technology and a slightly lower price.

Elsewhere in the range, the revision’s headline changes are new 1.0 and 1.5-litre TSI petrol engines that give better fuel economy and lower emissions to the petrol side of the car’s armoury. There are new infotainment, active safety and semi-autonomous driving technologies, too; new equipment; and some pretty minor exterior and interior design tweaks restricted mainly to the bumpers and lights.

Had the dieselgate scandal not forced VW to slash at least a billion euros in annual R&D spending just over a year ago, of course, you wonder if we’d be looking at a more widely revised car here. Handily for VW, there wasn’t much wrong with Golf Mk7 in the first place, the car having been immovable from top spot in our family hatchback class rankings since its introduction in the UK in 2013.

And, since VW was good enough to include it as part of its European press launch this week, the revised Golf GTI provided our introduction to the various new components of the revised Golf range. The formative, original hot hatch has been a useful telltale for the general wellbeing of the fast front-driver since its introduction four decades ago. It’s also the Golf that most of us most care about.

The GTI is in fine fettle. In material terms, at least as far as most petrolheads would care, it hasn’t changed much. But considering how much the hot hatch market has transformed around the GTI of late, it’s probably a bolder move on VW’s part to leave the car so unaltered than it might have been to follow the crowd, by dialling up the horsepower, chassis rates and price tag. Thank heavens they didn’t.

Volkswagen has pumped up the GTI’s power output by just 10bhp – enough to cut its 0-62mph acceleration claim by a solitary tenth of a second, and to add just 2mph to its top speed. That gives the standard GTI’s 2.0-litre turbo engine the same 227bhp peak of power that the outgoing GTI had when fitted with VW’s optional Performance Pack.

A new Performance Pack will be launched for the facelifted car later this spring, boosting the GTI’s power to 242bhp and likely adding the same electronically controlled slippy diff to the car’s specification, along with one or two other things. The standard GTI, meanwhile, continues with the same variable-rate ‘progressive’ power steering rack as before, and the same passive sports suspension, which can be upgraded to adaptively damped Dynamic Chassis Control suspension for an extra cost.