LIVING WITH A... VOLKSWAGEN UP!

THIRD REPORT A close shave has highlighted city car’s safety tech

Safety tech saves our bacon as city car continues to impress.

HOW much do you value safety? At Auto Express, we do a great deal. The importance of this was rammed home (nearly literally) to me recently as I was involved in an all too close test of the safety systems on our Volkswagen up!.

Trundling around town, there was nothing to make me think the vehicle in front would slam on its brakes. But it did.

It made me glad I ticked the £375 option box for VW’S City emergency braking pack, because the tech, always watching and waiting in the background, kicked into life to avoid a collision. Our car jammed the brakes on, avoiding an impact.

It was once a rarity on a city car, but more and more of these urban runarounds now feature this kind of system, and the up! is a great example of how technology initially pioneered by big cars can work just as well on smaller ones.

In fact, that’s a theme that runs through the up!. Having spent some time away from it recently, once I got back into it I was struck by just how good it is in terms of tech, refinement and performance.

So what else does our car have that you might not expect from a model costing less than some people spend on a wrist watch?

Well, I’ve mentioned the cruise control before. It’s not adaptive – which I don’t mind, as I’m still not convinced these systems are intuitive enough – but it means you can roll along the motorway at, well, motorway speeds without worrying about a big Merc or Audi hounding you down, such is the performance from the superb engine.

On twistier roads, I simply love seeing the little rev counter needle zip round the clock as the tiny turbocharger boosts the 1.0-litre unit’s performance.

However, there are a few associated minor drawbacks to these two points. Firstly, the engine is gutsy enough that it feels like it could actually use another gear. Sixth would make it even more refined and relaxing at speed. Secondly, the cruise control system uses a button layout that makes it too easy to turn it off completely when all you want to do is cancel the cruise.

“The up! is a great example of how technology initially pioneered by big cars works well on smaller ones”