Farewell, @volkswagendown

It’s not an obituary. It's not. My 2013 Volkswagen up! is a long way from dead and buried. But it has now moved on to a better place. 

The car I affectionately dubbed @volkswagendown was just not getting enough love from me anymore, so it has found itself a new owner; someone who will take care of it, love it, and most importantly – get a chance to drive it.

Since moving from the Blue Mountains down to Sydney’s inner west, I’ve parked the up! on busy side streets where it has collected leaf litter, sustained some hail damage and largely been ignored.

I didn’t really want to sell the car - I'd had it for about nine months and during that time the odometer reading has moved from 98,600km to 99,800km. Nor did I need the money. The up! cost me just three grand when I originally bought it, and I'd only spent about $1200 to this point in servicing it, lowering it and generally harassing it.

Here's an update on the past few months:

I decided that I was sick of stock wheels, so I painted them an eye-bleedingly bright aqua-ish blue. The rims didn't look big enough for the appearance I was after - at 14x5.5 inches, they were teeny-weeny considering that the up! had been dropped by a good 5cm up front and 7cm at the rear. 

So those lasted a couple of weeks before I decided to swap them for a set of mad 15x8-inch steelies. These looked awesome - I even liked that three of them were black and one was bronze. Oddball, just like the up!.

The problem? They didn’t fit properly. I had to buy new wheel bolts and run hub-mounted 20mm spacers which gave it plenty of poke at the front, but they made the front end shudder due to poor balance.

I decided to offload them in a swap for a set of 16x7-inch forged single-piece alloys. I had advertised for a wheel swap, and my new mate Gianni from Winmalee was more than keen to do the changeover. But his wheels didn’t fit my car – again – because the tyres were rubbing on the struts. So back went the spacers.

I drove it back into Sydney and my mind was made up. I’d had enough. I wanted to get rid of the spacers once and for all, so I bid on a set of neat looking 15x6-inch wheels with brand new Continental tyres on eBay, and to my delighted surprise, I got them for $150.

And the car looked great. The wheels had a simple but strong design, with a nice amount of dish and pretty darn good rubber. I just knew that, as good as it looked, and as happy as I was with it, it was running out of rego and was better off with someone else.

So this week I sold it to Billie, a lovely lady who lives not far away from me, in Camperdown. She has promised me she “will make sure it still gets to have fun”. 

I wish the up! a happy life with its new owner. I just might keep her phone number in case I miss it too much.

If you were the devil on Matt's shoulder, what car would you tell him to buy and mod next?