Saw the Beetle R concept (above) at the Geneva Motor Show in March and liked it. This week it’s made its US debut at the LA Motor Show and I reckon the Yanks will probably love it. Their enthusiasm for the original Beetle was always strong thanks to the Herbie films (a machine Auto Express readers this week voted the seventh greatest movie car of all time). It’s hard to think of the new Beetle, the one launched in 1999, as anything other than a missed opportunity. When the MINI came along two years later, it showed VW what it should have done. The Fiat 500 only compounded the problem. Early next year we get the new Beetle, the one this R version is based on. So will VW be offering a vast array of accessories and personalisation options in the way MINI and Fiat has done? The answer is I don’t know; the VW public website gives you the option to download the accessories brochure, but when you do you get a message saying it’s currently unavailable. What about the brochure for the actual car? No, that’s unavailable too. Seems VW hasn’t learned any lessons about marketing its heritage in the last 10 years.
If you want to upgrade your car and a Civic
ReplyDeletecivic ecu upgrads is an option, it is a cheap and easy upgrade to complete. So long as your vehicle was built in the past two decades or so, it should be able to utilize a Civic ECU chip, though earlier models may not be able to. Civics are already known for their remarkable efficiency as non-hybrids, so the several miles per gallon in fuel savings provided by a chip probably wonít impress you all that much. But a Civic isn’t a horsepower heavy vehicle, and if you need that extra power (perhaps for storage towing or for climbing up steep roads), a chip can provide a crucial assist.