Volkswagen Beetle

It's only very rarely that a car comes along which despite being reasonably ordinary and affordable, makes people point and stare as though it's something fantastically flash and expensive. The new Beetle cabrio is just such a car. During my week with the new drop-top people's car, I was the focus of attention wherever I took it - although that may just have been because I'm a bloke and it's a woman's car. Allegedly.

As a confirmed fan of the new Beetle and a devotee of soft-tops, from the outset it was going to be difficult taking a dislike to the car - and it was just the same for everyone who encountered it. But the really odd thing is how common the Beetle Cabrio already is - each time I took the test car out, I saw half a dozen others.

Perhaps the reason for the car's early popularity is the fact that it works so well - everything has been thought through so that it apes the original but isn't so retro to the point that it's just naff.

The roof treatment is a good example of this - when down, it stows pram-style, just like the original did. It all works electrically, although you do have to turn a handle on the header rail before it'll all do its stuff - and on our test car there was a plastic piece of trim which broke away, which is apparently a known problem. Minor maybe, but disappointing.

Whether the roof is up or down, it's all reasonably quiet, even at motorway speeds. I even managed a roof-down motorway trip with four-up and there were no complaints noise or space-wise. Considering the car's diminutive proportions, that's pretty good.

But although the hood is a neat design, the Beetle suffers from awful rear visibility, whether the roof is up or down. Because the roof sits so high when down, you can't see anything to the rear three-quarters, even with the driver's seat as high as it'll go - although at least there's a glass rear window which helps things when it's up and the temepratures plummet in the winter.

Other gripes include the lack of performance available from the 2.0-litre engine (especially when you consider this is the most potent of the engines currently on offer) and the lack of feel through any of the controls. It's all predictable enough, but hardly what you'd call rewarding. The boot is also tiny and the tonneau (which takes up much of the boot when not in use) is a neat design but didn't fit that well on our test car.

But few of these things matter when the sun is out and you've got a journey to make - at the moment there are few cars that can out-pose a drop-top Beetle.

Richard Dredge