VW Up Review: A Serious New City Car

The VW Up is a remarkable proposition, not least because Volkswagen has taken so long to make a genuinely committed move into the city car sector. It did offer the Lupo around a decade ago, of course, but the Fox that followed felt very much like a stopgap. The Up is nothing of the sort. This is Volkswagen, a major car maker, taking compact cars extremely seriously. When sales begin in December, VW expects the Up to become its best-selling model worldwide.

Volkswagen’s serious VW Up city car strategy

It will not be limited to a three-door model with a three-cylinder 1.0-litre engine, either. Here is the news: a five-door version is due to be revealed at the Frankfurt Show in ten days’ time, while additional engines will arrive later. According to Ulrich Hackenburg, VW’s hugely influential head of R&D, "there will be an engine with more than three cylinders, and maybe one with less, too". Other body styles based on this new platform are also planned. In other words, Volkswagen intends to market the Up aggressively, which spells trouble for rivals including the Fiat Panda, Hyundai i10 and Toyota Aygo.

The main reason is that this is an exceptionally convincing car. Begin with its dimensions: the Up is smaller than a Panda, yet provides a larger 250-litre boot and more rear-seat room. Its interior packaging is genuinely excellent. The cabin feels spacious in every direction, offering not only ample legroom and headroom, but also useful elbow room, while the driver and passenger do not feel squeezed together.

Volkswagen is not generally celebrated for clever packaging, yet it has achieved impressive results by placing the wheels at the extreme corners and making the wheelbase as long as possible. Quality is another strength. A few plastics feel brittle, but the surfaces you actually touch have been carefully finished. Naturally, VW has had to make compromises elsewhere to achieve this. The electric windows lack one-touch operation, for example, and the steering wheel has no reach adjustment. Still, the areas that matter deliver a proper VW experience: comfort, seating position, ergonomics, design, layout, textures, ambience, practicality and the rest. Clearly, considerable effort has gone into creating this car.

VW Up engine, performance and refinement

Consider the engine. It is a completely new all-alloy three-cylinder unit, the sort of motor that ought to suffer from vibration, particularly as it has no balancer shafts. Volkswagen has put in substantial work, and successfully removed much of the roughness, without sacrificing the appealing thrum for which three-cylinder engines are known. It is not especially powerful, admittedly, but that is hardly the point of a city car. Available with either 59bhp or 74bhp, the more powerful version we drove moves along with perfectly respectable enthusiasm. It is unhappy at high revs, becoming rather tangled as the 6000rpm redline approaches, but from 2,000 to 5,000rpm it pulls along cheerfully enough. The five-speed manual gearbox is pleasing as well.

The throttle response is rather lifeless and the steering offers little feedback, which is a pity. Perhaps Volkswagen is correct, however, that a degree of handling sharpness is worth giving up for a compliant ride. If so, it has succeeded, because the Up rides and behaves better than any other car I can think of in this class. Motorway journeys are no concern at all: it is sufficiently quiet, refined and effortlessly easy to live with.

Driving character, price and options

Is the Up enjoyable to drive, though? That is harder to answer. There is certainly enjoyment to be found behind the wheel, but it lacks the Panda’s keenness and the Aygo’s agility. For such a small car, it feels more mature and more purposeful than either.

There is that word once more. Yet the overriding impression left by the Up is not simply that it is grown-up. Rather, it feels like a crisp, fresh piece of design: a new interpretation of the city car, unmistakably Volkswagen, developed and refined over a lengthy period. It will represent excellent value if VW can hold pricing at about the £8500 level, while the options list is appealing too: a clever Maps+More sat-nav system for under £400, plus a radar braking system designed to prevent low-speed bumps for under £200.

The Up is good. It is good enough that the facelifted Panda will need to improve by several notches to equal it, and good enough to give the whole city car class a genuine shake-up. You expected nothing less, surely?