-How do you invigorate the legendary VW Golf Cabriolet?
Well, with jaw dropping engineering overhead instead of a canvass rag, but can that one thing outweigh all this car does rather badly.
Let's the drive the 2012 VW Eos and check the tech.
It cost more any VW should.
Looks too much like every Jetta does
and drives like an overpowered circus car might, but if want the most number of roof styles in 1 car, this isn't on your list.
It is your list.
Now, this is why you buy a Volkswagen Eos.
Watch what happens.
Here's comes the most amazing piece of automotive machinery rising up out of the bowels of this thing.
You've got the following: your overhead rails, a glass moon roof is tucked in there, a glass back light is tucked in there,
and it's all gonna work around that rear quarter panel that also lifts up to clamshell this whole thing into availability.
By they way, this is the only retractible in the world that also has a moving glass moonroof, pretty sleek.
The top is a wonder, but you will also wonder what you're going to do without a trunk.
Much of the space is taken up this folding wind blocker thing and what looks like a huge Domino's delivery bag, make room for the [unk] in the cabin.
Now, inside the Eos is a pretty standard VW arrangement.
You see in this kind of gauge cluster and we've seen this head unit before.
Kind of chancy on the screen side, but let's check out what's driven behind it.
You turn the center controller here, which is rotate and click and it gets you through various icons that pop up as you go there.
Is there something wrong with it?
It just doesn't really make any sense.
There's nothing about a hemispherical array that aids my navigation of these things.
The map is pretty good quality though and as you can see you've got several views.
This 3D view is quite nice.
You've also got the usual 2Ds.
Street names are nice and clear and the rendering and the dock picture is also nice
again though on a small screen.
If I wanna hit those buttons, that's a little too small, but it it's right there I wanna do it.
They should have bumped those up in size.
Do you know what's missing here is like going in and out of the map, yeah, traffic.
A car of this price ought to have that.
Let's go to the media options.
Now, you've got 2 buttons for media, band and media button itself.
Band is obviously which radio band you're listening to, AM, FM, or Sirius satellite.
No HD radio here by the way.
If go to my media choices, those 2 are on a little carousel, CDs, single optical slot up here, SD card right along here, that incredibly popular media format.
Aux jack lives right here.
MDI is the multimedia device interface.
In this case, a pigtail is connected for an iPhone or iPad touch and Bluetooth audio along with Bluetooth hand-free calling, though I was able to get them to work about 50% of the time, getting in and out of this car with a Droid 2 paired to it
is hit and miss.
You'll never know if they are gonna find each other again.
My last gripe is the volume now that makes me nuts for some reason that it's got the universal on and off indicator on it, which looks like an indicator of where you are in volume, but it isn't because this is universal rotator.
It goes around and round a hundred times.
I kept looking at it thinking of where my volume was, but it doesn't tell you that.
You do have a good set of steering wheel controls, quite elaborate here for getting through various menus, phone calls, voice command, which is for the Bluetooth set up and Bluetooth streaming only not for NAB,
and a back button echoed here like you have here, like you often have on the screen, a lot of back buttons on this car.
They should have applied that to the whole design, but we'll get to the later.
I will get VW this and often in top car, you want good seat heaters.
This car got 3 levels from roast to par boil to tolerable via human ass, plenty of heat, and whatever you're listening to, once you find it, it comes out of 8 speakers around the cabin, and there aren't any upgrades on this, unless you go to what they call the executive trim care DIN audio system.
No rear camera available on this vehicle, only park distance sensors, front and rear, again, a little chintzy for a car in this price class.
One transmission, a DSG.
This is a dual clutch sequential automated manual, pretty elaborate stuff, so that helps to build this car's placement in the market.
You've got a standard Tiptronic gate.
Pull it back to drive.
One more for sport behavior or back to drive and over to the right to get your shiftability.
Now, every Eos has the same stuff in the engine bay regardless of which trim level you get.
This 2 liter side saddle inline 4 with intercooled turbo charging and direct injection.
It has a lot of good stuff there.
If it's a ford, they call it eco boost.
In the VWs, they call it TSI.
Your numbers are 200 horse, 207 foot-pounds of torque, gets this relatively dense small car up to 60 in 7.3 seconds.
Remember it's a lot of weight in that top apparatus,
and the mileage is also pretty good, 22/29.
Doesn't quite propel this car into the top echelon of fuel savers, but still efficient.
There are 2 fundamental places where this car falls down flat on its face.
The first is something cowl shake.
That's when you got a convertible with a top open and as you're driving over anything but a glass smooth road, but cars kind of do in this, kind of twisting
longitudinally.
You see the cowl go like so.
Did give away to look in your rear view mirror and see it bouncing all over the place, even see it in here in the header on top of the windshield.
My 69 Ford convertible does that, but it's a 69 ford.
The other problem in this care is wheel spin.
That's the sort of ungainly equivalent of a burn out, but it's when a front wheel drive car does it and it's not cool.
It's just slippery.
It's a real bad thing the front wheel drive car used to do like back in the 80s
when they were new.
Again, shouldn't happen today.
Those 2 things and perhaps something to do with the weight distribution of the sheer way to this car with the top, I'm not entirely sure lead to miss.
Most of that Volkswagen [unk] that I love about their cars, but of course is I'm telling you all this, I'm loving the fact that I've got this wide open car that I know I can button up into a hard top and also roll back the glass roof I want to.
Yeah, buy this car for the top.
Bottom line, the Eos is not
worthy of being VW's most expensive car.
It just makes you want the golf cab to come back, which it is, but not to the US making this guy that much harder to take.
Okay, let's price our 2012 lux trim.
This is the middle car by the way, 38 grand base that includes destination charge.
Now, there aren't any tech options to speak, although they think there is.
As I think all the tech package.
It's actually a lighting package.
It gives you Bi-Xenon, adaptive front steering headlights,
and headlamp washers, but I don't call that a tech package, I call that headlamp package.
I wouldn't buy the car with or without it.
