Quick! While stocks last, you can still by a TenaCity 1.4i for less than R85k …and despite knowing I am speaking to a brick wall when it comes to Golf drivers, I won’t recommend it.
Rather look at the Polo Vivo 1.4i, a two-door hatch back which I can recommend. Volkswagen SA launched the Vivo to fill the cheap niche in which the City Golf has been king for 46 years.
While the Vivo generates the same 55 kW as the TenaCity that it replaces and costs R16,800 more, it does add thick A-pillars, crumple zones, crash bars and two airbags to the bargain.
On today’s congested, high speed roads, you need all of this and more, none of which you’ll find in the 1974-design of the City Golf.
If you want to go and test drive any Polo, you’d better be pretty specific about your choice, for VW now offers a bewildering array of them – 23 models at last count, not including the two Cross Polos.
Being neither pretty nor specific I got the next model range up on the Vivo, an entry-level Polo 1.4 Trendline, which costs R144,900 in its socks, and came with R17,990 of optional extras, including a rather pricey aircon for R9,280 and unnecessary parking sensors for R3,510.
In Belfast’s thin air, we soon learned all this extra safety and luxury added up to “heavy”. Hence even old people in City Golfs could beat our Polo 1.4i Trendline in every dice. This was humiliating only until we saw how little remained inside a smashed City Golf on the N4…
So before buying the last of the City Golfs, look at the Polo Vivo. That R16,800 extra comes down to less than R400 month in instalments, and your life is worth more.
