They’re trying to compete with the lower-end luxury cars. The problem is, they’re just Opels with the box for leather seats ticked. And leather seats do not make a luxury car. Take the Buick Regal- it’s basically just an Opel Insignia with different badges. That car competes with the likes of the Ford Mondeo (aka…

All of those are predominantly driven by Irene, a 59-year-old receptionist who can’t wait to retire, so she can spend time with her grandchildren. She bought a convertible to make use of the 3 days of sunshine you get in Blackburn, Lancashire, to show off the ‘tan’ she gets out of a bottle and her ‘I want to speak to…

It’s £86,120 base on the UK configurator, which is $111k US (roughly), which works out as $89k without the UK’s 20% VAT.

They sold a fair few actually. Mostly in the Polo and the Skoda Fabia. The more powerful, more efficient 1.4 TDI was a much better fit for those cars though. To say nothing of them putting the 1.9 SDI in the Golf and Octavia. The Golf took 17.2 seconds to reach 60 mph, and the Polo 17.0, which is frankly dangerous.…

Along similar lines, a lot of SUVs with height adjustable suspension drop into a ‘high speed’ mode above a certain speed, where the additional ground clearance is irrelevant, but lowering the suspension makes a noticeable aerodynamic improvement.

VW used to do an ‘SDI’ version of the old 1.9 TDI. Still had direct injection, but no turbo, and no power, either. 

Renault used to have something that in the UK was branded as the ‘boot chute’ on the Modus (which was brand-engineered into the original Nissan Note)

Snow tyres are really winter tyres. I don’t know what Nashville is like in the winter (I’ve only been there in the summer), but winter tyres work better than all-seasons in all conditions below about 5C (41F). 

I think that what people are getting at is that FWD+snow tyres is better than AWD+all seasons, not that having snow tyres makes all vehicles equal. I don’t think that anyone would disagree that the best thing in winter in snow-prone areas is AWD+snow tyres.

Taxes. Take the 19% VAT off the price of a Golf R and it’s about $40,500, pretty much the same as it is in the US. 

It’s basically the same price, pre-tax, as the Autobahn model is in the US. Cars (and everything else sold to consumers) have the taxes included in the advertised price, unlike in the US. 

It’s worth pointing out that the $44k price quoted in the article is a direct conversion of the base price in Euros in Germany. Which includes 19% sales tax. Knock that off, and it’s just under $36k at current exchange rates. 

It was Peacock Green here in the UK IIRC. It was never on the GTI as far as I know, but has been dropped from the standard cars. The ‘Turmeric Yellow’ colour has disappeared too, despite being used in lots of the marketing (and still being available on the Arteon). They’ve introduced a metallic red, which I’ve not…

VW offered a really nice metallic green on the facelift Golf 7, but they’ve dropped it now. Shame really. I’ve only seen a few cars in it, but it looked great.

I briefly had a stop-gap 1997 Peugeot 306 in dark green. 

Hmmm...

Less so in the UK. Most cars are bought on order or from company stock. My current car (a bright red Skoda Fabia) was from Skoda UK stock. Most colours were available relatively rapidly. My car was waiting at the dock in Germany for shipping to the UK. Effectively Skoda UK order a large number of stock cars and then…

15 days for not only drink driving, but also fleeing the cops? That’s definitely not enough IMO. Should have a nice big fine too, and at least 6 months away from the road!

I mean, it’s definitely no total deathtrap. EuroNCAP are rating cars that were considered very safe in their time (Fiat Punto, first sold in 2005 with a 5* rating) as being very poor (the Punto now has a 0* rating), partially because the game has moved on in crash performance, but mostly because the technology has…

I think a lot of the VW reliability issues stem from when they were trying to cheapen the Mk.4s for the US market. The German-built cars are bulletproof- you see them everywhere here in the UK, even though they stopped being sold here 14 years ago. The Mexican ones? Not so much.