VW CC VR6

The 2009 Volkswagen CC VR6 Sport is a really good-looking sedan with a luxurious interior. Its engine delivers power and good fuel economy, and the driving experience is smooth. The navigation system shows live traffic and the audio system is very clear.

The cabin electronics are beset by odd problems, such as difficulty copying music to the car's hard drive and a navigation system that can be hard to use.

A really beautiful sedan, the 2009 Volkswagen CC VR6 Sport returns decent fuel economy and a comfortable ride, but the cutting-edge cabin tech has a few faults, and the car is pricey.

If the 2009 Volkswagen CC VR6 Sport represents the future of Volkswagen, the company has a bright future indeed, and we get to benefit from some very beautiful cars that strive toward luxury. But the CC's beauty is mostly skin deep, as many attributes of the car reflect its folks' wagon underpinnings. The engine and interior quality are clear stand-outs, but the ride quality removes some of the car's luster.

Electronics also seem impressive at first, but the cabin gadgets are bedeviled by weird quirks and outright faults. The model's broad $13,000 price range between base and upscale models suggests Volkswagen couldn't decide if it wanted to market a midsize or sport-luxury sedan. But we can't deny the car's aesthetic appeal, its nicely curved roofline suggesting the much more expensive Mercedes-Benz CL550.

In poking around the navigation system for our 2009 Volkswagen CC VR6 Sport, we found a feature called Tour, which allowed us to enter a series of destinations and organize them into a coherent route. We used the system to define a route that would test the car on high-speed freeways and mountain roads where we could see if the word "sport" in the model name had any foundation. Entering destinations along the freeway was easy using the onscreen keyboard, but when we tried using the map to find waypoints on mountain highways, we ran into trouble. In map input mode, you get a disc overlay on the screen, which you have to drag to your destination. But the disc was extremely balky, refusing to easily follow our finger on the touch screen and leading to an epithet-filled one-way shouting match with the car.

Getting the tour programmed was further exacerbated by the fact that, if we hit a wrong button, all of our work would be lost. A couple of times we had multiple waypoints entered, then accidentally hit a button that took us out of Tour mode. Although this navigation system is hard-drive-based, it didn't save our work, forcing us to start from scratch.

Once our route was in place, however, the system did an excellent job of guiding us out, using street names and useful graphics to let us know where to turn. The system also includes traffic reporting, which would have been handy if there were any incidents on the freeways we initially set out on. But we had an unobstructed cruise in light traffic, and the CC offered excellent drive quality. The V-6 engine could barely be held back, putting us well over the speed limits before we realized it. The steering, transmission, and suspension were all silky smooth, while the cabin felt nicely insulated, further leading us to underestimate our speed. Even better, our average fuel economy was closing on 27 mpg over an hour of driving at speeds around 75 mph.

After this bit of freeway driving, the CC lulled us into forgetting our difficulties with the navigation system, and we were thinking it was the perfect car. But that impression faded after a few miles on a country highway, where rougher asphalt transmitted a less pleasant ride to the cabin, reminding us that this was, in fact, a Volkswagen. At lower speeds it became more apparent that the CC uses electric power steering, which produces a whirring sound when you turn the wheel. But Volkswagen did a good job of programming the steering unit for more road-feel and heaviness as the car's speed increased.

Into the fun portion of our tour, the navigation system still providing excellent direction, we attacked the curvy highway with vigor. In the corners, some typical understeer made itself felt, but the engine was ready to send plenty of power to the front wheels, pulling us through the turns. With the six-speed automatic transmission in sport mode, we found it a little lazy on shifting, maintaining too high a gear when we got on the brakes before a corner, but once it downshifted, it held the lower gear long enough to build up speed on any ensuing straight-aways or keep the engine speed up enough for the next turn. In manual mode, paddles on the shifter let us choose the gears, with shifts occurring fast enough for our purposes. The suspension isn't particularly sport-tuned, and we felt a little body roll and travel when the car was subjected to fast cornering.

Our tour was ended abruptly by a jagged rock in the road that put a big gash in the left front tire. The car helpfully pointed out the problem by putting the message "flat tyre" on the speedometer display. We pulled over, jacked up the car, and put on the spare, a temporary donut, then limped home.

We've been pretty disappointed by past Volkswagen navigation systems, and were looking forward to trying out this new system in the CC. Hard-drive-based navigation systems are cutting edge right now, and usually mean better-looking maps, faster processing, and extra features such as traffic and onboard music storage. Our first look at the interior of the CC gave us a lot of hope, as the steering wheel had smartly-designed buttons set in the spokes for using navigation and audio, plus a dedicated phone button--our first time seeing Bluetooth in a Volkswagen.

But that phone button let us down immediately, as the optional cell phone support wasn't installed in our car. Seems like something that should be standard at this level. The navigation system mostly lived up to its promise, providing high-resolution maps, but showed that balkiness during map input mentioned above. The maps include 2D and 3D views, along with a nice 3D compass graphic. The traffic overlay, with information transmitted over Sirius satellite radio, looked particularly good, showing traffic flow on major roads and potentially obstructing incidents. With a route programmed, the system will also dynamically detour around bad traffic. But we didn't always find the onscreen interface clear, as shown by our trouble programming in multiple destinations.

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