Price as tested: €13,265
+ Styling, front seat comfort and space, equipment, economy
– Ride a touch firm, awkward rear seat entry, tiny boot
= Up, up and hooray
Sometimes the old schedule just works out nicely, and this week, instead of my usual book-a-convertible-for-the-dead-of-November I actually managed to book both the new Fiat Panda and the new Volkswagen Up to test drive within a few days of each other. So, while this is not strictly a twin-test, it will be almost impossible to review the Up without reference to the Panda, so close are they as rivals.
The first and most significant thing to note about the Up is its almost staggeringly low price. Here is a car with a pukka Volkswagen badge (a large and prominent one too) on its nose that you can get on your driveway for under €11k. €10,995 is the starting price, for the most basic Take Up model, which will be pretty basic, but even going for the specced-up High Up as tested here, you’re still going to be spending significantly less than €14k.
And there is a lot of spec. As standard, a High Up comes with 15” alloys, air conditioning, heated seats, ESP, City Emergency (which, Volvo-like, slams on the anchors if it detects an incoming collision at low speeds), leather steering wheel and gearshifter, front fogs and an ‘easy entry’ function for flipping the driver’s seat forward.
Our test car, in addition to all that, had the optional Maps & More sat-nav and infotainment system, controlled by a neat little removable touch screen, which only added a very reasonable €370 to the price tag.
So, from within, the Up really doesn’t feel like a diminutive city car at all, at least not in this specification. The broad fascia, with its big sweep of body colour, the surprisingly low-set , comfy seats and the panoramic view out of the windscreen all combine to make it feel bigger and more grown up than you might have expected.
From the outside, it looks tiny though; almost as broad as it is long and styled in a very easy-on-the-eye Mies-Van-Der-Rohe style; all rigorous subjugation of form to function’s control.
However, there are some issues, statically speaking. Space in the back seats is reasonable. If you’ve got small kids, they’ll fit fine but the front seat occupants may have to budge up a bit to allow space for bulky child car seats. Getting in the back is a bit of a faff, though. As mentioned, our car came with the (optional) Easy Entry system that’s supposed to return the seat back to its original position once you’ve flipped it forward to let someone in or out of the back. But it doesn’t work, or at least, not very well and the position and motion of the lever that flips the seat means it’s impossible to do one-handed. OK, such problems will be irrelevant once the five-door Up arrives in the summer, but it’s a pain for now. While we’re at it, the boot is just too small. Officially, it’s 251-litres, which is quite decent but it’s very narrow and certainly won’t take a kid’s buggy. The boot in the Panda is much better shaped and more useful.
On the road, though, the Up begins to claw back serious ground. With a wheel at each corner, you would expect the handling to be go-kart-like, in the vein of the original Mini. The fact that this is not the case (at least not yet) is a mild disappointment, but the Up’s refinement, comfort and generally very useful performance more than compensate.
The dinky little 999cc three-cylinder engine thrums with typical off-beat three-pot gurgles when you rev it, but once up to a cruising speed it’s actually very quiet. Around town, the gearing is ideally set so that when pootling along at 50kmh, you’re actually up into fifth gear, saving a dramatic amount of fuel. Although the lack of stop-start is a bit of a surprise, the Up doesn’t actually seem to need it. We managed a very impressive 5.4-litres per 100km average (that’s better than 50mpg, and looks good against VW’s official claimed figure of 4.7l/100km, 60mpg) and squeezed more than 500km out of it before the refueling light came on. That easily beats our 7.4l/100km average in the 1.2 Panda.
With such town-friendly gearing, you’d expect the Up to be a desperate chore on the motorway, but it’s not. That broad track makes it feel very stable and surefooted, it doesn’t get bounced around by side-draughts much and there’s just enough torque in the engine to keep it on the boil when mixing with other fast moving traffic. The low-set seats (unfashionable for a space-efficient city car) make a long journey much more comfy than in high-set rivals like the Panda, too.
Dynamically, it’s well sorted but a bit vanilla. It goes, stops and steers just as it should, with lovely steering weight and feel, but not much enthusiasm for being hustled. The more hyperactive Panda is more fun to drive, but oddly, it also rides better than the Up. Maybe it’s the short dimensions but the Up felt a bit too firmly sprung for our tastes, certainly for a car that’s destined to mostly be soaking up cracked and broken city streets and speed ramps.
In the end, the Up is exactly what you think it is; a Volkswagen that;s been shrunk down to city car size. It has similar quality, refinement and comfort to its bigger brothers (although it won’t take much looking around the cabin to spot where VW’s been cutting the cost corners), is remarkably frugal (another Volkswagen trait) and looks utterly brilliant, especially in the bright red of our test car. The fiddly seat mechanism will be nulled by the arrival of the five door, but the boot does remain awkwardly small.
Overall, we just (juuuuust) prefer the new Fiat Panda, thanks to its more practical boot and sharper chassis, but the Up’s combination of VW-badge desirability, remarkable economy and tempting price means it’s hard to see them doing anything other than flying out of showrooms.
See the Up’s City Emergency Braking in Action:
Facts & Figures
Volkswagen High Up 1.0 75bhp
Price as tested: €13,265
Range price: €10,995 to €13,265
Capacity: 999cc
Power: 75bhp
Torque: 95Nm
Top speed: 171kmh
0-100kmh: 13.2sec
Economy: 4.7-100km (60.1mpg)
CO2 emissions: 108g/km
Tax Band: A. €160 road tax
Euro NCAP rating: 5-stars; 89% adult, 80% child, 46% pedestrian, 86% safety assist
