On Tuesday we got our new car - a Golf GTI. We didn't get it for the GTI part, but it was the only Golf with the features we wanted to have: bucket (sport) seats, Xenon headlights, manual transmission.

For a German it sounds completely ridiculous that you can't configure a Golf to your liking, but in North America options are very limited. You can only get the standard Golf (Rabbit) with one engine: a 2.5l, 170 horse powers - and yes, this is the "smallest" engine you can get from Volkswagen in the States, if you leave out the TDI with a 140 horse power diesel engine. This is plain jackass sales policies given the economic disasters and today (or at last yesterdays) oil and gas prices

Next, there are some more constraints: