FIRST DRIVE VOLKSWAGEN UP!:VW's earlier city cars were sturdy but overpriced: now with its latest offering, the Up!, it has a smart and appealing vehicle that's priced to be a serious contender for downsizing motorists, writes PADDY COMYN
REINVENTING THE wheel. It happens all the time in the motoring world. At a preview of the Volkswagen Up! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name) deep in the bowels of Volkswagen’s headquarters in Wolfsburg in Germany, the company’s shiniest top brass were assembled.
Winterkorn, Hakenburg, de’Silva and De Mea are names that might not mean much to you, but they are given hushed reverence around the industrial buildings of this factory city.
Tailored suits, security details and smiling-but-deadly press handlers helped conduct this well orchestrated pre-motor show unveiling of VW’s new baby.
The Up! will be the customer’s passport into the VW range; it sits below the Polo as a low-cost low-emission starter car or empty nester. And given the enthusiasm with which it was unveiled, it means a lot to the folks most responsible for it.
Apparently the new car was conceived on a transatlantic flight. Realising that the US was downsizing rapidly, VW’s chiefs commissioned Walter de’Silva, the carmaker’s chief designer, to scribble a new small car, the bones of which were sketched by the time the plane had touched down in Germany. It is a nice tale, even if it is a little on the tall side.
What there can be no doubt about is the importance of the Up! in the European context.
Although in Ireland we tend to scoff loudly at anything without a “boot”, the ever-creaking cities of Europe love a small car. Vehicles like the Fiat 500, Toyota iQ and the Smart car are frequent sights parked in various states of abandon in places like Paris and Rome. VW realised that it was missing a bit of the action.
But you don’t need to be a motoring historian to remember that VW has been down this road before. There was the Lupo, a three-door with a cartoon face and the build quality of a Sherman tank, which sold reasonably well but was too sparse and too expensive to be a massive success.
This was followed swiftly by the Fox, which took the Lupo’s small momentum and stopped it dead thanks to the ill-conceived idea that a car produced for the Brazilian market would work in Europe.
Weirdly, however, Volkswagen Ireland managed to shift 80 of them this year. But if you go back further in time, to the start of the VW Polo’s life, then you realise that a light, three-door affordable hatchback isn’t a new idea. And we won’t even mention the Beetle.
You need your poker face when you are in the front row of a presentation where a brand reveals that its target audience is young people and “silver” people. Silver is, apparently, the new, polite way of saying old.
But VW couldn’t bring itself to show an actual old person, dressed mainly in beige and looking grumpy. Rather it showed “Franca”, who was 64, an artist and a grandmother, with shoulder-length silver hair and sparkly trousers. Think Lady Gaga in 2051 and you get the idea. If your granny looked like this you’d probably have her sectioned.
The Up! is a three-door, but will eventually be a five-door, with a 1-litre three-cylinder engine that coughs up less than 90g/km of CO2 from either 60bhp or 75bhp variants. It is 100mm longer than the Lupo and 13mm longer than the Fox, despite sitting on a shorter wheelbase than the Fox.
But unlike its predecessors, which were heavy Volkswagens made smaller, the Up! is a small car made like a Volkswagen. That is the key difference and perhaps what will make it stand out from its rivals. Rather than looking overtly cute, the Up! looks purposeful and smart. It will sit four adults without amputation, and its boot, while small, isn’t altogether useless.
The interior is of a very high quality for a car of this size and price, and as well as a dashboard that will match the exterior colour, owners can choose a pop-in navigation system that will come with apps, very much like an iPhone, to display trip information, album covers and driving behaviours.
Thanks to a partnership between Volkswagen and German navigation provider Navigon, this unit will be called a Portable Infotainment Device (PID), and while also working as a GPS system, there will also be a range of downloadable “apps”.
Unlike many other systems, the user simply snaps the PID into place above the centre console. And this system works together with the car’s network of systems much better; navigation, telephone and infotainment can be controlled and viewed via the PID’s touchscreen. The apps developed for the Up! will be available to download.
On our 40km test route we discovered that the Up! feels substantial but nowhere near as lumpy, in terms of handling, as the cars that preceded it.
The engines sound gravelly but are perky enough, and there is a big-car feel to this tiny runabout. The controls are light, but the steering isn’t overly so.
Sitting at 140km/h on an autobahn it felt stable, something you can’t say about many of its rivals.
So all of this comes at a high price, right? Well, no. Here is the thing: €10,800 is around where we can expect this car to start in Ireland for the entry-grade version, the “Take” Up!, with €800 more getting you the middle-spec “Move” Up! and under €13,000 getting you the “High” Up!
Given that many of its rivals are in and around €12,000, this means that having the VW badge and build won’t cost you more.
Selling a small three-door car is always going to be a challenge in Ireland. About 95 per cent of Polos are five-door cars, but there might just be a decent appetite for this three-door, which is likely to be on its own until late 2012.
The 20-to-35-year-old market would love this car. Sadly this audience is finding access to finance a challenge. So it might be down to the Irish “silver” buyer willing to downsize without forgoing quality to seal the Up!’s fate.
The Up! goes on sale in Ireland in early 2012. A five-door will follow sometime next year, with an all-electric version in 2013.
Despite the somewhat limited appeal of a three-door on the Irish market, VW reckons it could sell 120 in 2012.
If they can get a good finance offering on the Up!, perhaps an in-house finance deal through VW Bank of under €100 per month, then it might open up this once-ignored segment. These days it is all about getting the customer early and keeping them there. Up! might just do that for VW.
Factfile
Engine1.0-litre three-cylinder petrol engine with 60- or 75bhp
EmissionsNot finalised but less than 90g/km
Motor tax bandA
Annual motor tax€104
On saleJanuary 2012
Price likely to start at€10,800