THE FACELIFTED POLO VIVO STARTS AT R266,600 - WHAT USED VAG CARS CAN YOU GET FOR THE SAME MONEY?

The Polo Vivo is the bread-and-butter model of the local Volkswagen lineup. It’s the entry into Volkswagen ownership, but it’s still a decent chunk of change, especially when you consider how much people in SA earn and what they can afford to spend on a car. With a starting price of R266,600, if you put down the minimum required deposit for finance, you can expect a monthly instalment in the region of R5,500, and then you need to add insurance on top of that, so a total monthly instalment can cross the R6,000 mark. For that price, you get the base version with a normally aspirated 1.4-litre lump rated at 55 kW with 130 Nm of torque and it’s mated to a 5-speed manual transmission. While it will definitely sell as well as it has in the past, there are other options under the VAG cars banner that can get you a fair bit more for your money. In this economic climate, most people want the best that they can get for their money so a well-looked after low mileage model can be a better choice. We decided to check what other cars in the VAG house you can get for that R266,600 base model budget. If mileage is a concern, most need not worry as VAG products can do many kilometres of trouble-free driving. My own 2004 Mk4 GTi only started giving a few issues at nearly 250,000 km a good 20 years later. As part of the search, we’ll cap the mileage at 100,000 km, because a pre-loved VAG car is just run in and working as it should. That may be our VW bias setting in, but in this case, it’s not really a bad thing.

Check out these 10 VAG cars we found on our favourite car sales site, Autotrader SA. These examples cover a bunch of different styles of car, you can have a cabriolet, a van and even a performance model or two. Which would you spend your hard-earned money on? A brand new 55 kW Polo or a low mileage GTi?

If it were our money being spent, we’d happily take the 10-year-old Audi TT cabriolet that’s got just over 90,000 km on the odo. Sure, there aren’t service plans included on a manufacturer level, but these cars can be bought with a decent aftermarket warranty, and in the grand scheme of things, they’re not really too expensive to maintain. There’s bonus point if you find a pre-loved VAG car through Volkswagen’s Mastercar network of approved cars. The point of this isn’t to show that the facelifted Polo Vivo is expensive, it’s just to show that there are other options at the same price point.