Golf muddles its ABC

If you've read our UK drive in the Golf GTI Performance and come away bewildered by the whole adaptive dampers thing don't worry. You're not the only ones. VW has got itself in a right mess with reassigned abbreviations that don't even seem consistent across vehicle menus and official publicity material. Leading one roadtester to complain about his adaptive dampers not making any difference to the ride when in fact he was fiddling with the cruise control. So let's try and detangle the whole thing. First up, you can have your hot Golf - GTI Performance or not - with standard passive dampers. Or pay an additional £800 for three-mode adaptive dampers offering Sport, Comfort or Normal settings. Now, in the UK pricelist this option is described as ACC, or Adaptive Chassis Control. But there's a problem here because the Germans have already assigned 'ACC' to the Automatic Cruise Control within the vehicle menus. Which would be confusing enough already if this wasn't referred to as Automatic Distance Control or ADC in UK marketing material and didn't also have three modes to choose from - Normal, Sport and Eco. Begging the question what the hell 'Sport' cruise control is about but we'll save that for another time. So having engaged ACC Sport mode you may well be wondering why your dampers still feel squidgy but your cruise control has gone all aggressive and has you tailgating the car in front. Wrong abbreviation! Having paid £800 for your fancy pants 'ACC' dampers the button you need to engage in the vehicle menus is in fact Dynamic Chassis Control, or DCC. Which is what it's always been in markets other than the UK. Brain hurting yet? Basically if you're looking at a used Golf Mk6, a Scirocco or a Passat CC and it boasts of having ACC on the spec, yes, you've got adaptive dampers thanks to a historic SNAFU in UK market branding terminology. If you've paid £800 for 'ACC' (as per the pricelist) on your new Golf GTI you're actually getting DCC and already had ACC as standard, albeit the cruise control one. Source: Pistonheads