First Birthday

32,000 miles, 26th June 2005

Well, one year on and almost 32,000 miles later my 2005 model VW Golf V is celebrating its first birthday. It’s been a great year. I have no regrets about buying this car and can imagine having it for many more years.

It looks like I may have been lucky getting a 2005 model back in June 2004. It would appear that June is about the time of the year when new model year Golfs start appearing in the UK. It would appear that 2006 model year Mk Vs are about to start hitting the streets here any day now.

I feel lucky in the sense that new Mk Vs being delivered up until recently were physically identical to mine, albeit for a few changes to standard specification for UK models. It feels like my car has stayed “new” for pretty much its entire first year.

I don’t really think I’d have been too disappointed with a 2004 model year car. The changes were relatively minor (Click here for more details). However I remember whilst awaiting the delivery of my new car, checking that all the features I had in my then current car (a 1995 top-of-the-range Peugeot 306) would be in my new (I thought 2004 model) Mk V. The only feature I was disappointed to think I would loose was an external temperature display. Maybe its just me but I like knowing how hot or cold it is outside! Back then, the only way I would have been able to get this would have been to buy the GT model (which included an external temperature readout in its Trip Computer rather) than the SE, but that would have been just silly. So I was very happy to see when my (2005 model) Mk V arrived that an external temperature readout had been included in the slightly redesigned Multi-Function Display.

My car is not perfect, but then again I wouldn’t expect it to be. From new my car had a jerky handbrake and one very faint swirl mark in the paintwork of the nearside front wing,. The cause of the jerky handbrake was identified and fixed quite efficiently at the car’s first service. The swirl mark has never bothered me enough to get fixed. As for design faults, I think my car suffers a bit from the common Mk V fault of a poor drivers door seal. Again, not enough for me to get fixed. I also sometimes wish there was less road noise coming up through the tyres. It’s something I’ve got used to but I intend to try a different brand of tyre when the originals need replacing. Finally my car does have the odd rattle (yes – a Golf – with a rattle!) but then, like us humans, nobody’s perfect.