Gadgetory

there we go truth in advertising how do you reinvigorate the legendary VW gone and really well with jaw-dropping engineering overhead instead of a canvas rag but can that one thing outweigh all this car does rather badly let's drive to 2012 VW EOS check the tech it costs more than any VW should looks too much like every jetta does and drives like an overpowered circus car might but if you want the most number of roof styles in one car this isn't on your list it is your list now this is why you buy a Volkswagen Eos watch what happens here comes the most amazing piece of automotive machinery rising up out of the bowels of this thing you've got the following your overhead rails a glass moonroof is tucked in there a glass backlight is tucked in there and it's all going to work around that rear quarter panel that also lifts up to clamshell this whole thing into availability by the way this is the only retractable in the world that also has a moving glass moonroof pretty slick the top is a wonder but you'll also wonder what you're going to do without a trunk much of the space is taken up by this folding wind blocker thing in what looks like a huge Domino's delivery bag make room for the Cinna Stix in the cabin now inside the EOS a pretty standard VW arrangement you've seen this kind of gauge cluster and we've seen this head unit before kind of chintzy on the screen size but let's check out what's driven behind it you turn the center controller here which is rotate and click and it gets you through various icons that pop up as you go there there's something wrong with it it just doesn't really make any sense there's nothing about a hemispherical array that aids my navigation of these things the map is pretty good quality though and as you can see you've got several views this 3d view is quite nice you've also got the usual 2ds street names are nice and clear and the rendering and the dot pitch is also nice again though on a small screen if I want to hit those buttons that's a little too small but it's right there I want to do it they should have bumped those up in size oh you notice what's missing here is I go in and out of the map yeah traffic a car this price ought to have that let's go to the media options now you've got two buttons for media band and Media button itself band is obviously which radio band you listening to AM FM or Sirius satellite radio no HD radio here by the way if I go to my media choices those two are on a little carousel CD single optical slot up here SD card right along here that incredibly popular media format aux Jack lives right here MDI is the multimedia device interface in this case a pigtail connected for an iPhone or iPod Touch and Bluetooth audio along with Bluetooth hands-free calling though I was able to get them to work about 50% of the time getting in and out of this car with a Droid 2 paired 2 it is hit and miss you never know if they're gonna find each other again my last gripes the volume knob it makes me nuts for some reason that it's got the universal on/off indicator on it which looks like an indicator of where you are in volume but it isn't because this is a universal rotator it goes around and round a hundred times I kept looking at it thinking that's where my volume was but it doesn't tell you that you do have a set of good steering wheel controls quite elaborate here for getting through various menus phone calls voice command which is for the Bluetooth setup and bluetooth streaming media only not for nav and a back button echoed here like you have here like you often have on the screen a lot of back buttons in this car they should have applied that to the whole design but we'll get to that later I will get VW this in an open-top car you want good seat heaters this car has got them three levels from roast to parboil to tolerable by a human's ass plenty of heat and whatever you're listening to once you find it comes out of eight speakers around the cabin and there aren't any upgrades on this unless you go to what they call the executive trim car and that has a dine audio system no rear camera available on this vehicle only Park distance sensors front and rear again a little chintzy for a car in this price class one transmission a DSG this is a dual clutch sequential automated manual pretty elaborate stuff so that helps to build this cars placement in the market you've got a standard Tiptronic gate pull it back to drive one more for sport behavior or back to drive and over to the right to get your shift ability now every EOS has the same stuff in the engine bay regardless of which trim level you get this 2-liter sidesaddle inline 4 with intercooled turbo charging and direct injection there's a lot of good stuff there if it's a Ford they call an EcoBoost and the VW's they call it TSI your numbers are 200 horse 207 foot-pounds of torque gets this relatively dense small car up to 60 and 7.3 seconds remember is a lot of weight in that top apparatus and the mileage is also pretty good 20 to 29 doesn't quite propel this car into the top echelon of fuel zippers but still efficient are there two fundamental places where this car falls down flat on its face the first is something called cowl shake that's when you've got a convertible with the top open and as you're driving over anything but a glass smooth Road the car is kind of doing this kind of twisting longitudinally you see the cowl go like so dead giveaway is to look in your rear-view mirror and see it bouncing all over the place even see it here in the header on top of the windshield my 69 Ford convertible does that but it's a 69 Ford the other problem in this car is wheel speed that's the sort of ungainly equivalent of a burnout but it's when a front-wheel drive car does it and it's not cool it's just slippery it's a real bad thing that front-wheel drive cars used to do like back in the 80s when they were new again shouldn't happen today those two things and perhaps something to do with a weight distribution or the sheer weight of this car with the top I'm not entirely sure lead it to miss most of that Volkswagen schwa divvy that I love about their cars but of course as I'm telling you all this I'm loving the fact that I've got this wide-open car that I know I can button up into a hardtop and also roll back the glass roof if I want to you buy this car for the top bottom line the EOS isn't worthy of being VW's most expensive car it just makes you want the golf cab to come back which it is but not to the US making this guy that much harder to take okay let's price our 2012 VW EOS luxe trim this is the middle car by the way 38 grand base that includes destination charge now there aren't any tech options to speak of although they think there is there's a thing called the tech package it's actually a lighting package it gives you bi-xenon adaptive front steering headlights and headlamp washers but I don't call that a tech package I call that a headlamp package I wouldn't buy the car with it without you