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Hello everybody.
New here so an introduction
I have had three Volkswagens. An aircooled Kombi that I kept for three days because it was hateful, An early MK1 Scirocco which was amongst the worst of the 80 or so cars I have owned in the past forty five years and a breadvan Polo I needed in a hurry and sold at a profit being most impressed with its economy and solidity A quiet thing with all the get up and go of a glacier, it was easy to live with even if estimated times of arrival required the use of an almanack.
My current car is a nice old Mercedes that is spending too much time on axle stands for this old git to find funny any more.
The Next Aeroplane fund has therefore been fully embezzled by the self appointed higher authority to "Stop messing about with that old heap and go and buy something half decent."
Said authority would not know a decent motor car if you were to run her over with a Veyron but she knows what she likes.
She likes the up! (my having read the reviews and noted that the build quality is said to be good,) and so tomorrow I'm off to sign the paperwork for the TSi I have placed a deposit upon.
This will be the first new VW I have bought and in order to secure a decent discount, I have bought a car that has already been built so my choice was make and model and that's yer lot. I live in a busy town but spend quite a lot of time travelling fair distances so the extra torque is an important facet of the purchase.
Initial impressions are of a simple and well made car with more than a nod to the ethos of the original Beetle. a genuine Peoples' Car in an age of bloated designer handbag cars like the current Mini pastiche. The sort of car that has the percieved quality of an Ipod. The best thing in its class, no argument and selling for a premium price as a result.
I would like to retrofit cruise and have extensively researched the subject. My car being a High up! (and therefore needing a marijuana leaf sticker somewhere on the bootlid) it ought to be fitted with the programmes required in the ECU and BCM, needing just a bit of wiring (which doesn't frighten me as a time served silicon chippie) and a control stalk to prepare it for a visit to a VCDS Wizard.
This being a new facelift car (Yes, I know about warranty implications,) I don't know if anybody has tried to do this already or could tell me whether the procedure and parts are the same as they are for a pre facelift car for which the conversion is apparently fairly simple and well understood.
In the meantime, greetings and I'll attempt to assist others I think I can be of use to and let you all know what I think of the up!
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Re: Hello everybody.
Welcome to the forum. We have a Skoda Citigo which we got for our kids to learn to drive. It has been a great car and no issues in over 20k miles (apart from the clicking clutch). The only things I don't like is the lack of DAB and there was no rear arch liners. I fitted the liners - which were from a VW dealer as Skoda didn't make them apparently - but haven't had a chance to do anything with the DAB.
I'm sure you will enjoy it - great little car for nipping about.
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Re: Hello everybody.
A year later - the follow Up!
After a couple of months, I hated it. Maps and More was a chore and it took four mobile phones and three dealer visits to get the navigation system to work. Once it did, its tendency to find 100 mile single track detours was quite enough to drive me half crazy. The wind noise and road noise were issues as well but, having spent the money, I was stuck with it. After a year, though, nothing - absolutely nothing ever went wrong with it so I fitted the cruise stalk and wired it all in, a non trivial exercise on the TSI because finding the correct connection to the ECU was like finding the combination to Fort Knox (Which I now have, available on request although I should warn you, I got there first.) A clever and helpful man on the UKPolo forum eventually found it for me after ErWin, VW and numerous specialists told me it couldn't be done. The big news though is the square foot of 4mm neoprene rubber and the loom tape. I cut the sticky backed rubber into 3" square pads and stuck them around the boot, rear arches and spare wheel well. Fitting the cruise wiring necessitated buying a roll of rayon loom tape for about six quid. I took the outer door seals and carefully pared about 5mm from the upper rearmost inch of them so that once closed, the seals didn't have huge gaps at the top. There were still small gaps though so I stuck the tape on the inside of the seal starting with a half inch long piece and overlapping it with an inch and an inch and a half until eventually I had a wedge three inches long. A single three inch strip along the top edge and then the test ride. Woman Belong Me immediately noticed that it was smoother. That is because it is quieter. So quiet in fact that the wind noise doesn't happen until 80 MPH and it isn't intrusive then. The road noise is dramatically reduced.
Google Maps now gets me where I want to go.
So far, I have managed a top speed in still air (checked against my aviation certified GPS) of 127 MPH on a continental road and I drove from Den Haag to the French border and averaged 93.4 MPG.
The cruise control will be coded in on Monday. I like the Up a lot more now that most of its shortcomings are alleviated. The clonk in the suspension that my dealer's mechanics can neither hear nor feel will probably go away next year when I buy a set of GTI top mounts and lower arms.