VW Beetle Final Edition SEL: Review, Photos, Features
I have a soft spot for the Beetle and have often thought about buying one as a backup car. I like that it's fairly rudimentary compared to more modern cars (although the Final Edition SEL came with a nice camera system plus park assist and blind-spot monitoring). I also like that it's small, yet not too small: it's easy to maneuver in the city but also big enough to handle the suburbs and not get pushed around on the freeway. It would be the ideal vehicle for my retired self, puttering around the New Jersey 'burbs with jaunts to Manhattan and maybe the odd weekend road trip. Fuel economy is fixed-income friendly: 29 mpg city/33 highway/26 combined. The VW Beetle wouldn't work as a main family car outside of an urban context, but compared with other style-mobiles, such as the MINI Cooper and the Fiat 500, it's a worthwhile option to explore for singles and couples. The design annoys some, but there's no doubting its Bug-ness, so the car isn't trying to hide its lineage. It's also pretty fun to drive. With less than 200 horsepower, you can get into everything the Beetle has to offer.
The steering isn't terribly crisp, and the braking is sort of loose, but the suspension is sharp and once you get to tossing the thing into some corners, you want to toss it into more. I struggled a bit with turbo-lag from the 2.0-liter motor. It was easy to overcome by tipping the throttle in before asking for power, and even easier in manual mode, but more than few times I wondered where the juice had gone. Overall, this didn't bother me too much, as I didn't see the Beetle as a high-performance, small-engine ride (its siblings, the GTI and Golf, are a different story). VW sold a little over 14,000 Beetles in the US last year. Not bad, but not enough to keep the vehicle around. Consumers want four-door crossover SUVs these days, disadvantaging the awkward aspects of two-door hatches. So, so long, Beetle. It's not like we hardly knew ya, after six decades. But I always shed a salty tear when a model drives off to that great garage in the sky, and in this case, we really are sending off one of the most incredible auto designs in human history. So good night, sweet Beet! I'm glad I got a Final Edition ride.
Britain's drivers are suffering more punctures than ever before. But inexplicably only just over a third of new cars today are sold with a spare wheel as standard, a new investigation has found. With the UK's roads continuing to fall into a state of disrepair and increasingly riddled with potholes, motorists suffer more than 30,000 punctures a month on average. But when they do get a flat tyre and would like to open the boot to find a spare wheel, 62 per cent of new car owners don't have one. A wheel inconvenience: An investigation by What Car? 62% of new cars sold today don't have a spare wheel as standard. According to the RAC, pothole-related call outs are up by 110 per cent in recent months. Of all the breakdown assistance requests they received from customers in 2017, 352,619 were due to flat tyres. That's almost 30,000 punctures a month, or 1,000 a day. So far in 2018 the RAC has already had to respond to 127,726 call outs due to flat tyres. And shockingly, 50,402 (40 per cent) are calls for help because the affected vehicle doesn't have a spare wheel.
The situation has got so bad that the RAC and other breakdown providers now equip their patrol staff with a universal space saver spare wheel to help stricken motorists. New analysis by What Car? 8 per cent of new cars sold in the UK have a full-size spare wheel supplied with them. Another 30 per cent have skinnier space-saver spares that are designed to be a short-term fix. With one fitted, a driver can only travel at speeds of up to 50mph and its recommended the space saver is replaced with a full-size wheel with a new tyre at the earliest convenience. Another 30% of new models are sold with space saver wheels. Infuriatingly for motorists, the most common flat tyre remedy provided by car manufacturers are puncture repair kits. These are widely accepted as being difficult to use, ineffective and in some cases damage the rubber beyond repair at a later date. Still, manufacturers are supplying repair kits in 55 per cent of new cars that are available in showrooms right now.
The remaining 7 per cent of cars come with run-flat tyres, which are more expensive to replace. It suggests that of the 2.5 million new cars registered in the UK last year, 1.6 million won't have a spare wheel in the boot. As the frequency of punctures increases, drivers' ability to cope with them is being hampered by cost-savvy vehicle manufacturers. The motoring magazine said: 'A tyre repair kit costs around 拢20, whereas a space-saver spare wheel could cost 拢100. To see which new cars were - and weren't - equipped with a spare, What Car? 251 new models from 31 brands to find out what puncture remedy was being offered as standard. RAC data also showed evidence of a switch from spares to repair kits - which ultimately results in more stranded motorists. The organisation told This is Money that back in 2010 it dealt with 29,371 鈥榩uncture no spare鈥?call-outs.
