Driving the Volkswagen Golf GTD The sixth generation of the Volkswagen Golf has been on American roads for three years. That may seem like sufficient time for a vehicle not named Murciélago, Zonda or Veyron to shake off the incredulous gasps and covetous glares of passers-by. But the Golf I drove over Labor Day weekend, painted a Kermit-like shade of green, was on a tourist visa, its German license plate gleaming below its honeycomb grille. The car prompted children to squeal and fanboys to fumble for their camera phones. Badges on the liftgate, grille and steering wheel were tip-offs to the few Volkswagen cognoscenti I encountered that this was also forbidden fruit: the Golf GTD, the diesel-burning equivalent to the GTI hatchback. Like the VW Up supermini recently reviewed in The Times, the GTD was in town briefly, making a goodwill swing through the Autos desk. Owners of Volkswagen's turbodiesel models visit online forums to gloat about the hard-won results from their hypermiling experiments. An American couple recently drove a 2012 Passat TDI more than 1,600 miles on a single tank of fuel, a Guinness record. For my first time behind the wheel of a turbodiesel VW, particularly this turbodiesel VW, I merely wanted to drive as I would a GTI -- with brio, that is -- and let the fuel gauge mind itself. With 168 horsepower, the 2-liter engine of the Golf GTD surrenders 32 horses to the 2-liter gasoline-burner in the GTI. Volkswagen estimates the GTD, fitted with the DSG semiautomatic transmission that appeared on my car, reaches 60 miles per hour from a stop in 8 seconds -- not slow, but no match for a DSG-equipped GTI, which Motor Trend once clocked at 5.8 seconds. Indeed, around Brooklyn, the powertrain tended to pause before acknowledging a heavy Nike on the throttle. And over my neighborhood's suspension-terrorizing asphalt ridges, valleys and black holes, neither the Sport or Comfort modes, selected using a button positioned forward of the gear selector, helped the 3,155-pound two-door hatchback readily find its footing. Why, then, were a few days behind the wheel of the GTD so gratifying? In a word, torque, and lots of it: 258 pound-feet of the stuff, or 51 pound-feet more than the GTI. The GTD would never wrest the mantle of Archetypal Hot Hatch from the GTI, but it wields its two trump cards, torque and frugality, like bludgeons. On a weekend in which I drove 470 miles - again, with the aforementioned brio - the GTD averaged 37 miles a gallon. It was at the outset of a trip to the Pennsylvania Dutch country when the shock-green German import, which my girlfriend took to calling Apfel, morphed into something wholly addicting. As we accelerated up an expressway ramp in Brooklyn, the gurgles from the diesel motor coalesced into a singular, brassy thrum. Long before the merge point, we already were outpacing what few cars there were on the road. And once ensconced in the left lane, the GTD absorbed seams in the pavement like a showroom-fresh Lexus. Indeed, the car was infinitely more poised traveling at highway speeds than at the stop-and-go rhythm of our neighborhood. After a comfortable, well-damped ride across New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, two-lane roads through the cornfields of Lancaster County were not the ideal proving ground I sought, filled as they were with holiday traffic and the occasional horse-drawn buggy. It may have been for the best; having succumbed to the county's whoopie pies, raw chocolate milk, cheese and homemade root beer (curiously effervescent and sour, like kombucha), our constitutions would not have welcomed oversteer tests. Volkswagen has been less stingy than most European automakers in their earmarking of diesel models for sale in the United States. The seventh-generation Golf was introduced in Berlin just last week, and though that car is all but assured to spawn a GTI for the American market, as well as a Golf TDI, a GTD is not in the product pipeline for Volkswagen of America. In Elmhurst, Queens, a day after our Pennsylvania butterfat binge, we came fascia to fascia with a sixth-generation GTI fitted with aftermarket blue headlight lenses and a suspension slammed to within a couple inches of the road. As we both turned onto Northern Boulevard, the driver, beaming, lowered his window for his companion to shoot a video on his smartphone. "That's the diesel, right?" the driver asked. I offered a nod and a grin. "I want it," he said. God, do I want it. It may have been the first time in the annals of automotive culture that a tuner lusted after a less powerful, more efficient variant of his own car. But such were the wiles of an imperfect but lovable tourist named Apfel, the likes of whom we may never know again on these roads.