HARRISON BOUDAKIN

The art of understanding what defines tragedy is an intriguing process, one that the great wordsmiths, playwrights and philosophers have long toyed with. In his Renaissance work, Othello, the venerable Shakespeare is most clear in giving us a spectrum of tragedy. Here stands a figure who’s decline towards terrible fate is imbued with a real sense of the tragic, not simply because of where the deluded General finds himself at his lowest moment; but rather because we come to learn throughout his demise the extent of his once-greatness. Tragedy, then, is not tragedy without the heightened intensity of falling from a position of grace. 

 

So it is with this in mind that we approach a confounding automotive conundrum, on in which very real questions of how to deal with and understand tragedy are contemplated.

 

The essential heart of the matter is thus. Yours truly has been the owner of a Volkswagen Golf VI for nigh on four years now. Back in 2012, the little black capsule of German goodness - penned by the godly Walter d’Silva - seemed to capture the essence of Volkswagen at its absolute peak. Here was a car that seemed to possess that most indefinable, Deutsch quality that only the Germans do so well: classlessness. Subtle engineering, melded effortlessly to a quietly assertive aesthetic vision of social status, without the domineering whiff of social climbing. Brilliant. To truly place it is to envision it as a Mercedes-Benz devoid of elitism; a Corolla divorced from any sense of disinterested mediocrity. 

 

Take the 1.4L direct-injected, turbocharged 4 cylinder petrol engine. Torquey where it most needed to be, this little pot of lightly-blown power gently blazed a trail for an emerging crop of small displacement, high-specific output power plants, creating a new breed of ‘clever,’ tractable performance that, like it or not, has come to dominate the automotive landscape. Expensive, yet doubtlessly refined multi-link suspension strained the outer envelope, too. Even on a low-specification 90TSI, the Golf yielded unto its driver an experience of commanding excellence well beyond the class remit. 

 

And then there was the fabled Direct-Shift-Gearbox. Armed with twin clutch packs, 7 speeds and a still remarkable underlying engineering vision to out-establish the automatic establishment, the DSG seemed to take notions of what one expected of transmission functionality and performance, and turn them on their head. Really, it was the philosophy, the audacity of the DSG vision, which first captured me as a 13 year old - a 13 year old who didn't quite understand why he liked it, but completely got the pageantry of DSG’s genius. It took the simple act of changing gears, and way back in 2005, made it an engineering spectacle. I remember, sitting in a Golf GTI one year later, watching in awe as the tachometer needle ripped around the dial with an unnerving alacrity, spinning effortlessly to 6250rpm before flitting - as though weightless - into the next gear. The needle seemed possessed. The next gear. The next. Next. 3rd. 4th. 5th. Rapid fire. A hail of bullets, whose shell casings fell to earth with that stirring snap of exhaust crackle and pop. Each ratio served on a bed of oily German smoothness. I remember watching, thinking, this is not real. This is magic. But really, it was art. After all, it did for me what Pablo Picasso said all art should do: It washed the dust of the mundane off our souls.

 

And so I had to have one. I loved the idea of owning something that I didn’t quite understand. Of driving something that carried within it a more intense embodiment of mythicism than anything else perceived to rival it. The Golf VI with the DSG was it.

 

George Bernard Shaw once noted that first love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity. Das Golf was indeed lovely. It exceeded every expectation in the way in drove, in the way it so Germanically studied a road and ‘proceeded’ down it. In all, it more than anything embodied that great paradox of Germanus, the thing that has made every Golf great for the last 40 years: perfectly moderated innovation - the dark art of cloaking deeply individualistic engineering beneath a shroud of ubiquity. It spoke to everybody, yet it meant something to me. From the moment I shook its leather hand for the first time, I was infatuated. I had it. The great poet John Keats probably would have gone as far to note that the Golf found me honey wild and manna-dew, and sure in language strange, it said - ‘This, it cannot be true.’

 

But now, now… now I hate it. Like Mr. Keats, after that moment of bliss in the iron-heat of intrigue, I now find myself on the cold hill side, standing in the dark gloom of reality. So, why?

 

Living with the Golf has unreservedly been as the most confounding and debilitating experience of car ownership one could possibly imagine, one where the very feature that drew me in instead conspired - amongst other failings - to destroy my deep intrigue for the car. The DSG gearbox was the beauty spot that became a leeching hydra, cancerously spreading throughout the car, until, failure after wretched failure, its evil became so great that I simply could not see the body that lay beneath it. I knew when I purchased it of the DSG stories, of the recalls and the failures. But there was a blind faith that the men and women of Wolfsburg had perhaps at that point got it right. How could they fail? Such a phrase didn’t resonate within the German lexicon, did it? Surely? Really, I was Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moorish general who believed so greatly in the inherent goodness of his confidant Iago that he could not see the treachery and deception his friend was unleashing right in front of him.

 

How else to explain it, really? Logic - that countess who eludes us all in moments of curiosity - dictates I would not be surprised when the clutches started shuddering ominously at 16,000km. And then required complete replacement. And so I shouldn’t have been so incredulous when 10 days later they failed again and had to be replaced. Again. And then when the ABS wiring loom failed. And then when the DSG clutches failed again at 30,000km. And when finally the entire mechatronics system required complete replacement at 32,000km. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

 

Oh, and the dealers… Whatever you’ve heard about poor Volkswagen service, don’t believe it. This was so much worse. Jean-Paul Satre would’ve done a better job working on the car. At least he’d have appreciated the absurdity of it all.

 

It hurt, really, because I knew the whole thing could have been so much better. It hurt because I felt that car in its primacy, the lithe athlete bestowed with the steady hand of German precision. I knew, when it was working, what it was capable of.

 

But so, now, it must go. I don’t trust it. Nothing makes me angrier than the betrayal of trust by presenting false integrity. I don’t trust it, and now - thanks to November 2015’s emissions debacle - I don’t trust the company. And my anger comes with something else. A fear. That actually, all of this engineering ‘genius,’ the stuff that sucked us all in, really doesn’t exist. Maybe this is a company with a rotten core, whose desperate, hubristic drive to be World No. 1 led them to create the illusion they could do things they really couldn’t. The emissions scandal may have been the smoking gun, but the well publicised but now sort of forgotten DSG farce runs even deeper. It has the potential to plague the company for years, to haunt that thing Volkswagen needs more than anything right now. Their reputation. And, worst of all, it says this a company that not only lies to its customers, but has lied to itself about just how capable it really is. Maybe, after all, that sparkling engineering heart of the giant that lured us all, was, sadly, just imagined. 

 

And so, this is why I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering. The Golf must go, now, because what it is, is tragic. It stands for something fatally flawed: a company that cannot, seemingly, save itself from itself.