We went to the Mercedes dealer this morning to take the A180 for a spin. While looking at the Mercedes Nicole and I were both thinking that would be the car we wanted. It was spacious and handy, a great little car. Nicole drove it up and down to Stirling in the hills and we were a little bit disappointed by the car. It was a tad noisy (the automatic transmission didn't help), you could clearly feel the car vibrating when standing still, the steering was very (= too) direct, it didn't suck itself to the road like the Beetle, the seats were a bit thin so I felt a piece of plastic from the side of the chair and my knee was leaning against the hard armrest of the door which became unpleasant after half an hour. We were not expecting this from Mercedes...
One of the reasons I was weary of the Beetle was the position of the gas pedal. It's a bit much towards the middle and I thought it would hurt my shin (NL: scheenbeen). There was only one way to find out how that would go so we drove to the Volkswagen dealer again and this time I drove the Beetle in to the hills. I had no problems. I could lean my elbow on the middle console (which the Mercedes did not have!) which was comfy. It was a pleasure to drive. It performs very well too. So basically the only downside of the Beetle is the passenger/boor space. I finally decided that that was not important enough to not get a Beetle.So today we decided to get a Volkswagen Beetle TDi like the one above.
Because the black is really the only colour Nicole finds acceptable that's what it's going to be. We might bring it to a custom painter later on and have some cool decorations airbrushed on it somewhere.
