Three weeks today from pick up, I have done a fair bit of town, B road, and motorway driving and it has been solid with no unexpected bongs or error messages. It occasionally reads the wrong speed sign and gets confused with some poorly signed areas (New Forest), but less so than the old MK8. It seems a better car than the old MK8 in lots of small ways that all add up. It has updated itself about four times so far and unlike the old car it performs them on the move without the "pausing while the car is being driven warning" message like before, it does it very quickly as well. A huge improvement for me is the travel assist, which aligns itself much better in the lane centre than my old car did, which used to place itself slightly to the right and was sometimes defeated by long sweeping motorway curves. The new system/software seems to read and react to the road and its markings more accurately. The hybrid system performs faultlessly but I had no problem with that in the old car anyway.
All good so far, I hope I haven't jinxed myself by writing this...
I've had my Style Mark 8.5 now since July, no problems at all particularly, a few things have happened or I've noticed:
1) I've set the parking brake to
not automatically engage on engine off, it seemed to work initally, but possibly after some update (its had about three OTA) it ignores that I've said don't auto engage it and always does anyway.
2) The comfort window opening. I've set it to open all windows on holding down the unlock on the key fob, this doesn't always work and no windows open at all.
3) Travel assist, on one journey on UK motorway, it decided to slow me down on the motorway with a warning that a roundabout was ahead, it didn't brake harshly but it was "off the gas". It had decided I was leaving the motorway and so had taken the slip road off, which there was a roundabout, in reality I was carrying on underneath. Navigation was set and that was showing I was going underneath on the map, it hadn't deviated at all. It did this three times at other junctions. If this happens to anyone the quick trick is to press "RES" on the steering wheel and it immediately cancels the slow down and speeds back up, also pressing the accelerator does the same. On the same stretch of motorway in the opposite direction passing the same junctions it didn't do this at all.
4) I've lost connection to the VW servers on one occasion, so the 'Globe' is grayed out and voice control, traffic updates and the app on the phone all stop working. The eSIM was still on the Internet as Internet Radio was working perfectly so it wasn't a data/network connection issue. This resolved itself 24 hours later and just started working, so if anyone gets the same, rather than start resetting things, give it a day or two as it seems VW servers aren't the most reliable.
Other than those few minor niggles, I'm loving the car as a first time Golf owner.