Installed a throttle body pipe; This is the pipe that goes from inter cooler and into the throttle body. It made a noticeable difference in throttle response department; and reduced engine noise.

some piktors, to help visualize:
old vs new:


This is basically what was in the engine bay from the factory:


The reason for this mod is because VW marketing department thought that it would be a good idea to add some engine noise to the cabin by splitting the intake in front of the throttle body and routing some it inside. In reality, it put a lot of white noise into the cabin and sluggish throttle response.

I am ready for winter!

It's funny that VW would do that. I really find it interesting how often things like this are done...from what I can tell it is almost entirely focused toward impressing the automotive journalist who might drive the car for a weekend and be done with it...while it could make living with the car day-in day-out a noisy hassle.

Are those your main rims or do you have others? I thought I remembered others from another set of pictures.

Busy weekend. It looks like fun (to me).

The car in 100% stock mode is actually pretty quiet... mine was noisier because of an after market intake. The was actually one of my bigger annoyances with the car; you could not hear anything; it almost felt like the engine was electric.




Nope these are my 16" Old skool passat rims for winter. My 18" rims are in the basement, since they are useless in the snow :-)

Are those the awesome five-spoke ones that used to be in all the press releases when the Mk V was brand new?

if you are referring to these:


they weigh 30lbs but i have hard time getting rid of them because the MKV looks so good on those.

Yeah those. Very nice.

Those are beautiful rims.

I find those to be a bit over styled for my taste, I prefer classic BBS rims on Golfs. Really the only companies which consistently release tasteful rims throughout the model IMHO are Porsche and Subaru. Even Ferrari has released some awfully tasteless wheels...

I think mesh wheels looks awful on MKV. It just does not look right.

5 spoke are beautiful. I don't understand you complaining about your noisy car and how it's VW's fault when you just said it was really quiet stock.

I was not complaining about the car being noisy, I was just merely stating that mod removed white engine noise from the cabin

I have never been in an MKV nor have I driven one but I have driven a 2003 jetta 1.8t. The car did not feel like a car. I own a 98 GTI, and I can hear everything and hear the clutch. I like hearing the engine growl and everything. In the Jetta however, i was revving the car in second the gear to 4-5 K RPM and still did not hear anything, which was a big disappointment. However, when I watched videos of MKV GTI's I thought it had a nice sound to it . I might have been wrong.