Well I'm happy with mine, took me a while to decide but it does everything I want from a daily driver. I think of it as 3 cars in one
Comfy commuter:
A lovely place to sit in seat heated, air conditioned comfort on slow commuting journeys with the DCC in comfort. I use similar driving modes as others have mentioned, eco/comfort for the motorway and commuting journeys and ride the wave of torque. Even in some pretty nasty M4 traffic yesterday I still saw 36mpg on a 250 mile round trip. Stereo seems great to me, IPod connection works perfectly with all the info on screen. Sat Nav is a bit so so but I'm yet to find a fitted one that can match the Tom Tom.
GT style cruiser:
Superb for family journeys, 3 or 5 up, it's a cruiser with plenty of power for overtaking on A roads. Plenty of room for child/booster seats, leg room is good and the boot holds enough. DCC sport and engine in normal - except for the odd overtake seems to work well here. The power delivery is stealthy enough that passengers don't notice the extra urge too much. Overall to me it feels like a much bigger torque filled engine and gives a real GT feel. The relative anonymity and understated looks mean the car goes pretty much unnoticed and avoids the usual hassle from other road users with something to prove.
B road blaster
Best of all though when the right road comes along the
Cupra transforms into the 212bhp/ton machine it can also be. On dry roads it's as quick as the RS3 I owned and it's as much fun as any Renaultsport or Mitsaburu I've owned. Unleash the
Cupra across an open, well sighted mountain road and it is an eye widening experience. For a front driver the grip levels are superb, 235 tyres undoubtedly
help a lot here. Traction out of slow hairpins is superb. Leave all the assists on and it is as safe as going quickly could ever be. Turn the assists off and you get a car with real adjust ability, something the RS3 could never do. You can oversteer as much as you want if that takes your fancy - track or wide open tarmac recommend!. Even pressing on it still returns a reasonable 20ish MPG over a decent 100 mile or so trip (yes you can get it in to single digits over a short sprint but it's hardly representative). It really is a lot of fun.
Things I don't like? The silly sound generator, that is pointless. Being really picky the other thing is the window switches are too far forward on the door, I keep opening the rear window by mistake.
Should I have bought a Golf R or S3 and not had the mild traction issues? For £10-20k more at the same spec I couldn't justify it. None of my journeys are so time critical or important that awd was an absolute requirement. What the
Cupra loses in ultimate grip it gains back in steering feedback and front end hook up in the corners - especially vs the S3 which is weirdly sticky after the
Cupra.
The
Cupra is the perfect all rounder daily driver for me, if not the definitive master in any particular area. I couldn't find anything better or overlook the downsides of other cars enough (oh Subaru what have you done to the STi!) otherwise I'd have bought one of them instead. That it's bloody good fun too is a big bonus.