Second Take: 2012 Volkswagen Up!

Volkswagen, as you likely know, roughly translates to "people's car" in German. Decades ago, what it really meant was the Beetle, an inexpensive means of getting four people and a bit of cargo to their destination. Today, it means the Up!, which carries the same mission statement. I owned a 1967 Beetle. It was my first car, and my dad figured I couldn't get into much trouble with it (only spun it once!). I had that car for years and it made a lasting impression on me, but as I was driving the new Up! through the streets of Rome, my rusty old Bug wasn't the car I was thinking about. It was the third-gen Geo/Chevy Metro three-door hatch I drove to deliver pizzas in college. After all, that was a "people's car," too, and much more comparable to the Up!.

Stop rolling your eyes and keep reading. I'm fully aware of the Metro's reputation, and I'm not using it to insult the Up!. The Metro was a better car than it got credit for being. Do recall that it lasted over 15 years and three generations. At its peak, the Canadian plant that built the Metro was cranking out more than 100,000 cars a year. For as much grief as the Metro gets, it was a fairly popular car in its day. And let's not forget just a few years ago, during the gas price panic of 2008, people were paying thousands of dollars for used Metros that still achieved as much as 50 mpg.

The Up! is like that, but better. A lot better. Unlike the Metro, the Up! is a pretty stylish little car, if you're into German minimalism. The funky lines in the fascias and window borders bleed European postmodernism, as does the always-blacked-out, all-glass rear hatch. Love it or hate it, you certainly won't miss it. Me, I'm still trying to decide whether it's grinning or if it's been gagged.

More than just better-looking than the Metro, the Up! is a better-quality car. The materials, though rather inexpensive by Volkswagen standards, aren't even close to the worst we've seen in a sub-$15,000 car. The fit and finish is certainly up to Volkswagen standards. Also considerably better than the Metro is the Up!'s ride quality and NVH. The ride is a bit firm, befitting its German roots, but it still handled Rome's bumpy cobblestone streets nicely. If ride comfort were the only measure of a car, I'd have rather been driving those streets in the Up! than the Ferrari 599 I saw enduring them.

Aside from being a small, inexpensive, three-door hatch, the likeness between the Up! and Metro struck me most while driving it. Both cars are powered by inline three-cylinder engines (though the Metro later came with an optional four-cylinder) and standard manual transmissions. Each offered two three-cylinder engine options making almost the same power, 60 horsepower for the base Up! and 75 horsepower for the top models, 5 more in both respects than the Metro. As you'd expect, all models are rather slow by American standards. After all, with a quoted 0-to-60 mph time of 13.2 seconds, the Up! would lose a drag race with a Smart Fortwo by nearly half a second. Of course, all of these cars are designed to be big city runabouts, not race cars, and as such they're all geared to provide adequate acceleration up to about 40 mph.

Driving through the manic streets of Rome, the Up! never felt under-powered in traffic. After all, when you're doing the stop-and-go shuffle through city streets and topping out at 35 mph, you don't need a lot of muscle under the hood. Some of that's due to the throttle mapping -- in the high-powered model there was no difference in acceleration between 50-percent throttle and 100-percent throttle. Interestingly, the base engine was the exact opposite. The only time the Up! felt truly slow was merging on the highway and when trying to climb a steep hill, an arduous process in second gear with the pedal melded to the floor. That may have been the exact moment I was transported back to my pizza-schlepping days.

Like the Metro and original Beetle before it, the Up! is a strikingly honest car. It tries to be nothing more than a stylish, inexpensive mode of transportation, and at that it excels. At the right price point, in the right markets, it might actually succeed at being the wildly popular Beetle incarnate the conservative Polo never was. In Germany at a price just under 10,000 euros, it should prove pretty tempting.

But is America one of those markets? At the moment, Volkswagen doesn't seem to think so, as there are no plans to bring the car here. Three-door hatchbacks just don't do well in this market. There is, however, a five-door version coming soon. Could that car make it in America? That depends largely on how good the automated manual transmission is and what price Volkswagen can sell it for. Directly translated, the Up! would cost about $13,000 in America. Is it $2000 better than a base model Nissan Versa? That depends on how much style is worth to you. If Volkswagen can ship the five-door to America with 25 more horsepower and an even lighter price tag, it might just work. After all, a lot of Metros and original Beetles found homes in this country despite the presence of bigger, faster, nicer cars. And hey, near-Prius fuel economy for half the price is hard for even most stubborn American to argue with, especially in this economy.

Front-engine, FWD, 5-pass, 3-door or 5-door hatchback 1.0L/60-hp or 75-hp DOHC 12-valve I-3 5-speed manual, 5-speed auto-clutch automatic

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