There’s a Tesla Roadster on its approach to the asteroid belt. That’s a technique to ensure it won’t be back for guarantee service; each Tesla Roadster proprietor I ever knew generally had to maintain a a lot closer orbit round their native service facility. Still, I’ll guess you that even probably the most dissatisfied former house owners are charmed by this new-area-age stunt. It’s formidable, and other people respond to ambition. We may be frightened by it, as some people are in the case of various politicians. We is perhaps important or contemptuous of it, as quite a lot of on-line commentators have been regarding pretty much the whole lot that Elon Musk does. Nevertheless, we can’t assist but reply. Ambition is catnip to other human beings. It’s disruptive. Distorting. Contagious. The Volkswagen Phaeton would possibly by no means have escaped this planet’s gravity, however there was one thing more than just a little Musk-ish about Ferdinand Piech’s determination to have the people’s badge on the world’s best luxury car.
It’s been 12 years since you may buy a new Phaeton within the United States, and a couple of years since you can purchase the very evenly updated EU-market variant. Any Phaeton you see on the streets now is likey in fairly rough form. So you’ll should take my phrase for it once i say that no other car of its period could quite match it for pure luxury. The Phaeton made the massive Benz of the day feel a bit toylike. It weighed almost three tons, a lot of which was in the thick double-pane glass and obsessive insulation. There have been a whole lot of moonshot features to the Phaeton, from the 12-cylinder engine to the 4-zone local weather management to absolutely the perfection of the numerous available wooden trims. It appeared during an period where all people else was attempting to chop some price and weight out of their big luxurious sedans, and consequently it felt utterly distinctive.
In the long run, nonetheless, the Phaeton was merely too much automobile for the model. Enter the Volkswagen Arteon, which confirmed its blandsome face on the Chicago Auto Show this week. It’s an eminently wise replacement for the very lengthy-in-the-tooth VW CC, which was called Passat CC but is now just CC the same means Madonna is simply Madonna. It should provide a nice step up for current Jetta and Passat owners. It has a turbocharged four-cylinder like pretty much every other car in the world. It’s built off the identical VW Group platform that underpins most of the existing lineup. The Arteon won’t need a whole new elements stock the way the Phaeton did. It won’t require special training or distinctive certification for mechanics. It won’t spawn an underground owners’ group that learned learn how to hack the automobile with a VAG-COM diagnostics laptop to make Bentley steering wheels and German-market taillights work.
It won’t shock or awe your passengers, won’t amaze you with hidden capabilities, in all probability won’t break your coronary heart with month-lengthy vacations to the service division. You’re free to think about it because the Avalon to the Passat’s Camry: just a little extra model and area for just a little bit extra money. I’m sure the Arteon shall be a hit in precisely the same manner that the Phaeton by no means was. Everything about it makes extra sense. Yet a decade ago, I used to be seduced into taking supply of two Phaetons in the course of 18 months precisely because the vehicles didn’t make plain old sense. It was the ambition of them that appealed to me. The moonshot aspect of their design, engineering, and construction. The sense of specialness that radiated from each chiseled floor. I’m waiting for an additional luxurious sedan to give me that same sense of satan-might-care ambition. I’ve been waiting practically a decade now. Probably gonna have to keep ready. Today’s luxury sedans are cynical and calculated. The only one I’ve seen that feels really ambitious is the Lincoln Continental—but the high-finish versions of those are priced in V8 Phaeton territory with quite a bit much less content material. It’s okay. I’ll keep ready. For outrageous ambition; for a product with both eyes on the stars and no cautious toes in the shallow water of the balance sheet. For what they used to call a moonshot—but after this week, possibly we’ll need to call it a trip to the asteroid belt. Like the man mentioned: To infinity, and beyond!
