Volkswagen Beetle Cabriolet Range Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Volkswagen Beetle Cabriolet range
Prices: £14,530-£19,885 – on the road
Insurance Group: 6-13
Emissions: 17-212g/km
Performance: [2.0] Max Speed 114mph / 0-60mph 11.7s
Fuel Consumption: [2.0] (combined) 32.1mpg
Safety: Twin front & side airbags / ABS / ESP
Dimensions: Length/Width/Heightmm 4081/1836/1498

THE NEXT BUG THING?

Our Rating: 6.7 / 10

Volkswagen’s topless Beetle has been treated to a few changes over the years but it’s still as charming as ever. By Andy Enright

There’s something ineffably appealing about an open-topped Volkswagen Beetle. Dewy eyed romanticists will hark back to Jerry Garcia, Mama Cass and the Summer of Love, recalling their psychedelic ragtop Beetles and all the good times they signified. The latest car hasn’t sparked a return of tie-dye and sandals, but it has reintroduced a whole new generation of buyers to open top driving, Volkswagen style.

It’s been mildly facelifted but the changes haven’t amounted to much. There are revised bumpers and wheelarches, with sharper edges than before, plus subtly restyled headlights and front indicators, and tail lights with white circles inside the red circles. The ‘VW’ emblems have also been modified at the front and rear. In addition, there’s a new range of colours and alloy wheels, complemented by fresher fabrics for the interior. Chrome now adorns the air vents and surrounds the instruments, for what Volkswagen reckon is an even higher quality feel inside. Plusher Luna variants replace rather basic versions of the previous 1.4-litre and 1.6-litre models, and now include 16" Houston alloy wheels, in addition to ESP (Electronic Stabilisation Programme) with ABS, twin front and side airbags with active front seat head restraints, a radio/CD player, electric windows and remote central locking with alarm and interior protection. Prices start at £14,530.

Aside from that, it’s as you were. Ignore the fact that the Beetle is merely a MkIV Golf with a pretty set of clothes on. Bin the rose-tinted spectacles and you’d have to accept that the original Beetle was crude, noisy and uncomfortable, with a choice of engines less sophisticated than you’ll find in many lawnmowers these days. The latest Beetle Cabriolet borrows the heritage, the silhouette and the blue sky from the original but fuses it with the sort of fuel economy, safety and creature comforts that the modern buyer demands.

Take the hood mechanism. Raising or lowering the hood will only take 13 seconds thanks to a slick electrohydraulic system. All you’ll need to do is release a pair of latches on the windscreen header rail and press a button. The hood itself is a cloth-lined three-layer construction that does a surprisingly good job of cutting down on wind noise when in the upright position and includes a proper heated glass rear window. You do lose a little of the hard top car’s geometric perfection with the hood in place, but drop it back and your Beetle Cabriolet will look a million dollars – a fair return, we think you’ll agree, on a car that can be had from less than £15,000. Although the hood doesn’t disappear neatly into a cranny in the bodywork when in the down position, the overall effect isn’t unpleasant , being vaguely reminiscent of the original.

There’s a choice of five engines, the 75bhp 1.4-litre, the 102bhp 1.6-litre, the peppier 2.0-litre 115bhp unit, the 150bhp 1.8-litre Turbo or the 1.9TDI diesel, now uprated to 105bhp. There’s also an option of a six-speed automatic gearbox with the 2.0-litre petrol engine. None of the engines, bar perhaps the 1.8-Turbo, will fling you up the road with any great alacrity, but that would be missing the point of the car. The Beetle Cabriolet is built to cruise. Hammering one around with the foot to the floor seems slightly cruel, so we won’t bother with the usual 0-60 data and so on. Suffice to say, the 1.8 and 2.0-litre options are the better choices if you plan on overtaking, but the 1.6-litre car and the oil-burner have plenty enough to keep up in quick traffic.

Unlike many open-top conversions, this Beetle doesn’t flex like a wobbleboard when the road is anything less than billiard table smooth. The MkIV Golf-based chassis is renowned as one of the stiffest around and the decapitation process has retained much of that torsional rigidity. The rear view mirror doesn’t get an attack of the DTs when you pass over an expansion join