2019 Volkswagen Eos
Volkswagen has made successful inroads in the near-luxury game by building automobiles that look and feel like their legitimate premium cousins, but don鈥檛 necessarily feature the same high price tag one would expect. The Volkswagen Eos benefits from a retractable hardtop that also happens to house a sunroof, making it the only vehicle on the Canadian market to feature this type of dual, 'fun in the sun' setup. When initially seen with the roof closed, the 2012 Volkswagen Eos might seem to enclose a claustrophobic passenger compartment. This impression couldn't be further from the truth. The vehicle's roominess extends to the trunk which, while not huge, is more than adequate for a convertible the size of the Eos. With the top down, roughly half the Volkswagen's storage space disappears, but there is still a surprising amount of cargo room available for storing a few overnight bags. The amount of engineering expertise that has been applied to the VW Eos' navigation, entertainment, and driver information systems is also impressive.
It's also worth mentioning that, for an affordable car, the Volkswagen Eos really goes the extra mile to provide buyers with interior trim, buttons, and materials that feel like they belong in an automobile costing thousands of dollars more. Fit and finish is an area where Volkswagen has traditionally been able to best other automakers in the quality department, and the Eos is no exception. Yes, there is some cowl shake when driving the convertible over rough pavement, or a set of train tracks, but other than that the vehicle feels extremely solid. The 2012 Volkswagen Eos is motivated by a turbocharged, 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine that develops 200 horsepower and 207 lb-ft of torque. Fans of the brand will be familiar with this near-ubiquitous engine, which has become Volkswagen's workhorse and which appears across the company's lineup in various guises. In the Eos it is paired exclusively with a six-speed DSG (automated manual) transmission, with last year's six-speed traditional manual no longer available.
Purists might grieve the disappearance of a row-it-yourself gearbox from the Eos' tool box, but in reality this convertible is a tourer, not a sports car. Unfortunately, as enjoyable as it was to drive the Volkswagen Eos, it ended up leaving our test fleet ahead of schedule due to a no-start condition that appeared to be related to its fuel system. When parked at a steep angle, with roughly a quarter tank of fuel, the Eos simply refused to catch, turning over but ultimately stumbling and stalling until additional gas was added to the vehicle. The Eos was returned to Volkswagen for an analysis of the problem, but we were left upset that we had to deal with this type of unusual issue on a brand-new vehicle. The 2012 Volkswagen Eos is a viable option for anyone who wants to be coddled by a convertible without spending the kind of cash one would need to land a BMW or an Audi in the driveway. While the Eos certainly doesn't offer the same levels of performance as its more illustrious Teutonic colleagues, it provides more than enough power and comfort to be considered a legitimate - and more affordable - alternative. The catch has to do with reliability.
Table 5 indicates the presence of the product categories in the various consumption constellations and confirmed earlier research about the importance of clothing, electronic goods and cars as important distinguishing characteristics of consumption combinations. Discretionary time and retailers also emerged as important distinguishing characteristics of consumption choices. From the consideration of the COR figures for the row points it was clear that some of the product category items overlapped the various dimensions (e.g. some of the cars and some of the branding clothing products). 146;; especially where certain product categories carry image-laden messages and have symbolic meanings which are pursued by more than one group of consumers. However, retail constellations would probably not, by themselves, be sufficient to distinguish amongst all the dimensions. The value of the retail constellations will lie in the contribution which they can make to attempts to refine understanding of the different intermediate patterns of joint consumption. Dittmar, Helga (1992): The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have Is To Be. Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead.
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