When I first saw the Volkswagen CC at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show, thought this is a great looking mid size sedan.
But now they have updated for the 2013 model year.
Somethings have changed but not a lot.
Let's go inside and take a look at what's new.
CC stands for comfort coup.
But you can see this car as 4 doors, so not a coup in the traditional sense but following a long night here at the Mercedes Benz with the COS having a 4 door coup and they can get away with that because it has this really sleek roof line that follows back.
It starts at the trunk lid here then goes forward in this nice contoured design all the way to the front.
For 2013, Volkswagen updated the look of the front of the CC.
They went for a common design like which with some of their other vehicles.
Like for example, we've seen this grill on front of the Jetta.
We also get these LED parking lights around the headlights.
I see a hook design.
And you see that on the T gwan as well.
VW also had it standard these Bi-xenon headlights to the CC which give a nice bright white light thrown forward.
I like this navigation system.
We've seen it before in other Volkswagens.
It's what Volkswagen calls it's RNS 315.
But it's surprising to see this navigation system in this really expensive car.
Volkswagen also uses in their Jetta and their Beetle and some of the other lower end vehicles but Volkswagen has a more upscale navigation system called their RNS510.
That actually shows things like traffic.
Along with navigation system is they have this menu system as well and I really like this semi circular kind of menu thing.
It works really well.
It's easy to find your menu icons.
You can either just scroll this little wheel here and pick everything or you can punch these...
these touch screen and touch the little icons and make it react like that.
But one thing I don't like and too many automakers do is Volkswagen puts the Ipod port all the way over here in the glovebox.
Pull this little orange tab down which pulls this hole array down, pull the cord out, plug my Ipod in and close the whole glovebox back up.
When you're using root guidance, one thing that's nice in this car is they got a display in the instrument cluster and this display will show you pretty much everything.
It will show you audio information, your phone information, and it will also show your root guidance.
There's also voice command in this car for accessing the different functions.
It's this button right here.
It's got a little mic symbol on it.
But the problem and this kinds of bugs me in a car this expensive, this only works with the phone system.
And it won't let me access navigation.
It won't let me access the music service.
Nothing else.
The Volkswagen fits the CC with it's dual shipped gear box DSG.
This is a dual clutch transmission.
It's actually a manual transmission or it's what they call an automated manual and you can choose sport mode or regular drive mode and leave it to shift automatically.
And under the hood, we have Volkswagen's TSI 2 liter 4th zonder engine.
2 liter sounds like kind of a small engine to power this midsized car, but TSI means turbo charged stratified injection.
That's a technology Volkswagen has used for the last decade.
It do really means there's a turbo charge direct injection engine.
It's so good that every auto maker is ruling out similar engines.
BMW and Ford all have them.
Now VW have this engine for so long.
It's getting a little bit long in the truth, they could probably get more efficiency out of it.
Certainly the other automakers are getting more power out of similarly constructive engines.
But this does give this car an average of about 25 miles per gallon which is not bad, even better.
It gets the car to 60 miles per hour in 5.5 seconds which, yeah, for a car like this, it's impressive.
With the CC's dual shift gear box, doesn't act like a normal automatic transmission.
Like when I put it in drive, it doesn't wanna creep forward.
I actually have to give it a little gas to make it move.
Also, it has electric power steering.
You could really feel that and weight this...
during what it feels.
It appears it's like wearing sound which is the sound of the electric motor making the wheels move in giving you that boost.
Transmission has this sport mode which will keep it in lower gears and keep the RPM at mid, a decent amount of power at will.
But even with RPMs ride all the way up the red line.
We can also put it in this manual mode by shifting the gate over 1. And there, you can push forward to up shift, pull back to down shift.
And because of the DSG, it really grabs those gears really well.
You don't get kinda lagged like you get with a torque converter transmission.
You also get better fuel efficiency too which is why Volkswagen want with the DSG in this car.
I do like the ride feel in the CC.
It's pretty comfortable.
Although I don't know if a lot of people would really think it's much different than say a Ford Fusion or a Hyundai Sonata.
It feels pretty stable in the turns, and it handles the bumps pretty well.
2013 Volkswagen CC starts at about $30,000 for what they call the sport trim.
Everything you've seen here, this is the lux trim and that goes for $35,355.
You can even get this car with a V6 option in a higher trim level and that comes close to $40,000.
For that kind of money, I'd get a BMW 3 Series or a Mercedes Benz C Class or even spend $5,000 less and get a Hyundai Sonata or a Kia Optima Turbo.
