VW Golf refresh spied with new infotainment screen uncovered

The new Volkswagen GTI and Golf R may still feel like new cars here in the U.S., but VW is already prepping a refresh to the regular Golf over in Europe. We all know that what is applied to the Golf, we’ll see transferred over to the GTI and Golf R, making the interior spy shots of this test car mighty intriguing.

Volkswagen has heard the complaints about its newest infotainment system/center stack design a million times over from every corner of the internet at this point, and said infotainment system appears to be the big change shown in these spy photos. A new, much larger screen is perched atop the dash now, replacing the smaller screens available in today’s Golf variants. Below the screen are the touch sliders we already know of and despise on the GTI and Golf R. However, it’s unclear if VW has fixed the worst part of them in these spy photos: their lack of backlighting at night.

The volume control and temperature control touch sliders on today’s GTI and Golf R sit on a piano black panel, and against all common sense, they don’t light up at night. That makes it impossible to find the two most vital controls in a car’s user interface when driving at night, which is such a bizarre miss from Volkswagen. Since these spy photos are taken of a car during the day that is turned off, we don’t know if these touch sliders feature backlighting now or not, but we sure hope they do.

As for the rest of the interior, it’s business as usual. The same quick-access touch control buttons appear to lie under the larger touchscreen, and the beard trimmer shifter is unchanged. We can largely ignore the exterior since the U.S. won’t be getting the basic Golf pictured here.

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