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Have looked at the Skoda Citigo on the Skoda website - their version looks to have the same arrangement.
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I can open all four windows from the door controls in my car :P
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The up and its copycats are £7,000 cars, so something has to give to reach this price level.
The Aygo has a similar arrangement and in 5 years ownership it has never caused us any problems. The cars are so narrow reaching across on the very odd occasion opening the window is required isn't a hardship.
The original smart was the same and in four years ownership we never had an issue.
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daveyjp.'The up and its copycats are £7,000 cars, so something has to give to reach this price level'
Tosh. Nothing has to give to enable both driver and passenger to use both windows. Bad car design................ pure and simple. Simple brained design. The OP is right.
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Tosh. Nothing has to give to enable both driver and passenger to use both windows. Bad car design................ pure and simple. Simple brained design. The OP is right.
That's cobblers of the highest order. Extra switch to operate passenger door window from driver's side, about 50p. Additional wiring to support same, another 50p.
That's a quid. Find another few hundred little things like that to take out and your 8000 pound car becomes a 7000 Pound car. Basic economics.
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They do it this way because it makes the car cheaper, especially the LHD to RHD conversion as you can use the same doors/handles/switches etc on either LHD or RHD. My previous four cars driver's door has had a door handle cluster with two/three switches and adjustment pad for the mirrors, four window switches and a rear window switch lockout button. The passenger side just has one button.
The LHD version has a mirror image version. This means a mirror image design, different tooling, different installation, different wiring looms and routings. Even if you have just one extra switch for a drivers side passenger window you need all these changes and every alteration adds cost in terms of design and manufacturing.
The windows probably don't have auto up and down function for the same reason - the auto stop sensors cost money.
"Nothing has to give to enable both driver and passenger to use both windows"
Please tell me which car allows the passenger to open any other window than their own.
As I said in five years of Aygo ownership it was never an issue, just as it wasn't when I had manual windows.
IMHO the current trend not to fit a spare is potentially far more inconvenient
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TeeCee
That's cobblers of the highest order. Extra switch to operate passenger door window from driver's side, about 50p. Additional wiring to support same, another 50p.
That's a quid. Find another few hundred little things like that to take out and your 8000 pound car becomes a 7000 Pound car. Basic economics.
TeeCee, just read the comment. No one has said anything about an extra switch on the driver's side door
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I have never driven a car where the centre console has been a convenient location for window buttons. Rover used to put them by the handbrake - you couldn't find them.
The fact it is no longer the area of choice used by manufacturers suggests they see it as a bad idea.
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There are only 2 in an Up so won't be 2 hard to find located centrally within easy reach on the dashboard. Just like VW used to. Simple. They don't have to be around the gearlever. Just 2 switches like there are in the Up as it is.
Sometimes you want to let more air in the car while driving along. Leaning across to do this, especially while driving, you must be joking.
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Sometimes you want to let more air in the car while driving along. Leaning across to do this, especially while driving, you must be joking.
On the dash there's these little holes. They're called "vents". Open those, and air comes in. Amazing.
It's plain and simple. No-one is making you, or anyone else buy an Up.
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
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Sometimes you want to let more air in the car while driving along. Leaning across to do this, especially while driving, you must be joking.
On the dash there's these little holes. They're called "vents". Open those, and air comes in. Amazing.
It's plain and simple. No-one is making you, or anyone else buy an Up.
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
Ah "vents"; of course - how infallible. Not. Do people without working a/c drive around on a sunny day with their sunroof and windows shut? If so, I must be quite unique - I don't know what on Earth I was thinking last summer during that heat wave - how dare I wish to roll my windows right down and raise my sun roof, despite my car having a decent ventilation system!! Both my cars have electric front windows with the switches on the centre console. On my E46 3 Series they are either side of the gear lever and on my trusty old Hyundai Accent they are in front of the hand brake. Can't say I ever have a problem locating them on either car, though the BMW has the edge due to it's one touch facility.
Personally I also think VW have let themselves down on this elementary area and wouldn't consider buying an Up when a 12yr old Hyundai that I bought for £500 seems better thought out in some respects.
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I drove a little auto in Cyprus last summer which looked to be a rebadged Yaris - all of the controls were in the centre console. You could see that it was done that way for swapping LHD to RHD.
I wouldn't buy an Up! because I don't like very small cars, and it's basically a Fox, as they're doing that resizing where a Polo is now Golf-sized and a Golf is a fat Jetta and so on......also I dislike the gratutious use of the exclamation mark ;-)
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What's wrong with penny pinching? British consumers have shown a preference for feature-heavy cars and yet expect rock bottom prices. Cost cutting is the only way of making that combination viable. That and high servicing costs.
You can't eat your cake and have it!
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Channel Z, little holes are little. Windows create big holes and much more air. Some air vents in cars are as useful as a chocolate fire guard.
VW, did not need to appear to penny pinch. Two switches in the centre of the car would have remedied that. Then no one could accuse them of trying to save ££. Radio and heater controls are in the middle, used by both front seat passengers
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Not so many years ago cars used to have handles on the doors that were used to open and close the windows. Each door had its own and you had to lean across to open the passenger window if you were in the drivers seat.
Remember my boss getting a new Daimler in the 70's, it had central locking. You unlocked the drivers door with a key in a hole in the door and then once inside unlocked the other doors with a switch on the console. At the same time Citroen advertised that the 2CV had central locking as standard, they went on to explain that from the drivers seat you could unlock all the doors.
Why moan when a basis cheap car has electric windows, sounds like luxury to me.
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I can just about remember, at the very fringes of my memory as a little girl, that windows had those wind-ey handles on them ;-)
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I like manual windows. On a Morris Minor you can wind the window down in about 2 1/2 revolutions. But as windows got heavier and people lazier, they changed the pulley ratios so you were winding like b*****y to get the window down!
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Trust BMW, Holden, Saab, Mercedes etc to have the brains to put the switches in the centre, and the car Bobbin drove on holiday. No need to have two different armrest designs, for the front doors, so cheaper. Also, if you've children in the back and have them locked, so they can't play with them, both passengers in the front can operate them. Just one less thing for the driver to have to deal with.
VW missing having two switches on the driver's side smacks of penny pinching. Two in the centre wouldn't.
I do like unthrottled's philosophy. :)
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Switches in the middle in the Berlingo and very useful it is too, for the security gates at St George's Hill. :-P
Sadly what I mean is they don't like leaving their little hut for scumbag tradesmen.
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Whether it is in fact penny pinching or just poor design is open to debate, but the *impression* of penny pinching is irksome. It is really quite easy to give the air of quality: wood panelling, chrome, leather - real or fake! - conveys comfort/luxury, whereas an abundance of hard plastic and the absence of little details that a 21st century driver, rightly or wrongly, has come to expect does the opposite. My otherwise extremely well-equipped Focus TDCi ("Ambiente" spec in Spain) has plastic door trim I remember cheapo Vauxhalls and Fords in the 1970s and 80s with no passenger sun visor, hazard lights, heated rear windscreen, electric screenwash, rear wash/wipe, laminated windscreen, tinted glass, reclining seats, cigarette lighter, clock, reversing lights (cue the Four Yorkshiremen sketch and cries of "LUXURY!") and miserable one speed wipers and one speed heater fan: the list is endless. These are features that all cars have nowadays! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt3axkFoXHQ This BL Mini training film from 30 years ago takes us back to a time when a painted twin coachline and a ticket pocket in the sun visor was considered the height of decadence!
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Mr angry - aka ChannelZ,
"If you don't like it, don't buy it". Do you work for the department of stating the obvious?
Regards
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What a day, I get to defend VAG again. If that's all you can find to think of to complain about then it must be an OK car.
I've never seen one for real so I have no opinion yet.
For real penny pinching what about those pop-out windows on the Aygo and family? Except they aren't VAG are they...
And I don't buy VAG products and probably never will again.
Central console switches for windows? Just been out in SWMBO's FIAT 500 and there they were, either side of the gearlever, and I managed to use both.
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