Eos — and readers who know their ancient mythology will be well ahead of me here — is the Greek goddess of convertible motoring. In The Illiad, it was Eos who led Cephalus out on to the A3 near Hindhead and showed him the pleasures of top-down driving in a relatively humble but nevertheless surprisingly pokey Peugeot 207CC. It was Eos, too, who, according to Hesiod, controversially advised Tithonus not to get a convertible Ford Focus on account of the leaky door sills and who later chided Memnon for being a “hairdresser” on account of his fondness for his first series Mazda MX5 in yellow.
Oh, all right then. Not really. Eos was the goddess of the dawn, famous above all for her rosy fingers, and who was tasked, in the general scheme of things, with opening the gates to the heavens so that Apollo could commence his daily commute across the skies — an impressive amount of responsibility and also regular work, at which no one can afford to turn up their nose these days.
Yet, at the same time, it wouldn’t be pushing it to describe Eos’s function as pretty menial, goddess-wise. Essentially, she was responsible for slinging up the garage door so that Apollo could get his chariot out. (Clearly there was a “glass ceiling” in those days, even for goddesses.) Kudos-wise, you’d probably rather have a car called Apollo, but, of course, the space people already thought of that.
So, Eos it is, and when mine arrived, I did the obvious thing: I went out to see the sun come up in it. By which I mean I sat in it, on the drive, and pushed the button that automatically sends the metal top backwards into the boot, leaving you, the driver, open to the sky, exactly as nature intended.
Sadly, there proved to be no rosy fingers involved in this process. Instead, the roof contented itself with cleverly coming apart in five, easily stowed sections, rather than the more traditional and more cumbersome three, meaning there was still a fair amount of luggage space, even after the roof had occupied the boot.
Advertisement
With nothing more than a mildly distracted hum, the sections rose up, fanned out, concertina’ed and slid away. Homer, one senses, would have made a big deal of it. But then Homer made a big deal of everything. We, on the other hand, are perhaps growing a bit blasé at the sight of vehicles peeling themselves like this. In which case, perhaps we would do well to remember that, not all that long ago, getting the top on and off a car was a murderous business involving poppers and tags and finger-trapping clamps and squares of canvas that were, critically, just too small for the job that was being asked of them.
Nowadays, it’s an entirely stress-free procedure involving a solitary push on a solitary button, and if it takes more than 25 seconds for the roof to finish getting itself behind us, we feel completely entitled to drum our fingers and sigh and harrumph with impatience.
Moreover, these systems aren’t even any more the lofty preserve of high-end cars with gasp-inducing price tags. You can get an automatically opening roof on a Daihatsu Copen, costing around £10,000 — and yes, that’s including tyres, steering wheel, doors, etc. So that’s how far convertible motoring has come in our time. It’s one of the areas in which we can truly and without fear of contradiction account the early 21st century a golden period, along with shower gel, breakfast cereal and televised talent shows.
The awkward aspect of this, from the Eos’s point of view, is that customers for open-top cars are spoilt for choice as never before in the history of mankind — and, worse, many of those choices are priced more attractively than the Eos. My version of the car had various gimmicks plumbed into it which forced it up to an ugly £32,315. Which seemed like an awful lot of money to spend in order to get your hair in a mess. And, of course, everyone will assume it cost much less than that because it’s got a VW badge on the front of it, rather than, say, an Audi badge or a Mercedes badge. Imagine spending all that money on a car, and nobody really knowing.
Still, it’s furiously well-built. (It’s a VW, after all.) It’s got (if you choose carefully) the engine of a Golf GTI. It’s powerful, yet relaxed — dynamic without being frightening. It’s a properly plausible four-seater, rather than (as is so often the case with convertible coupes) a car with two proper seats in the front and a pair of only slightly modified cat baskets in the back. And it was built specifically to be a convertible — it’s not just a pre-existing model with its roof sliced off. So is this your chariot?
Advertisement
top speed 142mph acceleration 0-62 in 7.8 seconds average consumption 35.3 mpg co2 emissions:
188g/km eco rating 5/10 one careful owner Sarah Ferguson on the stereo Chris de Burgh in the glovebox Factor 51 bound for St Tropez buy it because It’s summer rating 6/10 Price:
from £28,310