Jules and I just bought our first new car together! He’s a 2008 Volkswagen Golf GTI. Mitchell, our 2002 Grand Am was starting to give us a little trouble so we figured it was a good time to trade him in before he became too expensive to maintain. We got a fair price for him, and it was enough to forgo a down payment on the new car. It was a little sad saying goodbye to him, but he has had a good life with us, and hopefully whoever gets him next will appreciate him. Bye bye Mitchell. :(

We picked it up from the dealer last night and took it for a spin. It is an absolutely incredible machine! I have never driven (nor ridden in) anything that smooth or powerful before. It has a turbocharger so it has some major oomph and just wants to go as soon as you touch the gas. With Jules lightly tapping the accelerator we were up to 40mph in less than 3 seconds…it was incredible. It’s a zippy little thing! For those of you interested, here are the detailed specs on that model.

The best part is the vehicle has a very unassuming presence. It looks nice, but isn’t flashy. It is hiding the beast within itself only to be unleashed when the ignition is switched on. It’s essentially a performance vehicle wearing the costume of a family car.

In terms of extras, we ended up getting the “Autobahn” package, which adds a leather trimmed interior, premium audio system, heated seats, 18″ wheels with all-season performance tires, and sunroof. We intended on getting the cloth seats because that knocked $3000 off the price, but when we actually saw them we were so underwhelmed that we decided that we might as well go for something we would really enjoy being inside. The leather interior is very, very nice, and it’s pretty obvious VW wants to push this over the cloth since the disparity between qualities is so high. Additionally, we had an iPod interface installed and are awaiting a cargo rack installation.

We took out a 60-month loan with VW to finance the car, so now we have to decide whether we want to work hard at paying it off early (which I’m sure we will anyway…we took the 60 month over the 48 month because the rates were identical and there is no penalty for paying it off early) or dropping that extra cash in savings and waiting it out.

So the next item on the agenda is a name for this beast. We have toyed around with various German names but nothing is sticking yet. Jules is quite fond of “Werner” and “Ludwig” but I’m still not sure. Any suggestions?