Good morning, and welcome to another week of cheap cars! I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. The All-British Field Meet was a blast; I got sunburned, saw a ton of cool cars, and took a wild ride around the off-road course in an old beat-up Range Rover. This is a far less serious event than the Goodwood Revival, where Jason, Beau, and Adrian spent the weekend. How much less serious? Check out one of my favorites from the weekend, a Jaguar XK140 fixed-head coupé with a blotchy, runny, rattle-can paint job:
Now that’s my kind of classic. I’ve posted a bunch more photos to our Discord server; if you haven’t joined yet, now is as good a time as any.
There was no poll on Friday, and very little consensus either, so I guess we’ll just get straight to the business at hand.
When you think of cities with a thriving car culture, New York City is not the first locale that comes to mind. Between the traffic, the lack of parking, and the terrible weather half of the year, New York sounds like a tough place to be a gearhead. But as much as “nobody walks in LA” isn’t strictly true, “nobody drives in New York” can’t be true either. If nobody drove, there would be plenty of parking, right? Stands to reason. So I wanted to see if I could find a couple of cheap, fun-to-drive rides for enthusiasts in the Big Apple. And wouldn’t you know it – the first two viable candidates I found were convertibles.
(Just a quick aside: It didn’t occur to me what today’s date was when I started looking for cars in New York City. I hope no one is upset by it. Just know that I would never exploit one of the worst days in American history for this silly little column. It was completely subconscious; I guess New York is on everyone’s mind to some extent on this date.)
Anyway, let’s check out some cars.
2004 Ford Mustang convertible – $2,200
Engine/drivetrain: 3.8 liter overhead valve V6, five-speed manual, RWD
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Odometer reading: 180,000 miles
Runs/drives? I assume so…?
If you’re looking for cheap and fun, no matter where you’re looking, you can do a lot worse than a stickshift Mustang. And right now, if you’re looking for a cheap Mustang, you’re going to find the “New Edge” style. This one has the basic 3.8 liter “Essex” V6, powering its good old-fashioned solid rear axle through a five-speed manual. Add in a convertible top, and you’ve got a recipe for cheap thrills, no matter where in the country you are.
We don’t get a lot of information to go on in this ad. Actually, we don’t get any information to go on. Year, make, model, mileage, and the fact that it’s a one-owner car; that’s it. I’m assuming it runs and drives, because selling a non-running car without saying it’s a non-running car is a way to get a lot of people angry with you. And these are generally pretty reliable and durable cars – the Essex V6 had some head gasket issues, but mostly earlier ones. The rest of it is about a complex as a can opener.
It looks pretty good too; just a few typical city blemishes, and no obvious signs of rust. The inside, with leather seats in place of the standard-issue cloth, looks great, but we all know photos can hide flaws. Also, all the photos show it with the top down – I assume it goes up, but maybe that’s a question you should ask. Leaving a convertible with the top down in any city is asking for trouble.
The photos in this ad are all a little strange anyway; why is the car parked on the sidewalk? It’s keeping some cool company, though, from the whale-tail Porsche next to it to the old 6-Series BMW across the street.
2008 Volkswagen Eos – $1,950
Engine/drivetrain: Turbocharged 2.0 liter dual overhead cam inline 4, six-speed manual, FWD
Location: Stamford, CT
Odometer reading: 119,000 miles
Runs/drives? Sounds like it
Moving a little ways outside of the city, we find this Volkswagen Eos, a two-door coupe with a retractable hardtop. Retractable roofs date all the way back to 1957, when Ford installed the option on its Skyliner convertibles, but the option saw a bit of a resurgence in the 2000s, with everyone from BMW to Chrysler offering a folding metal roof. Even Pontiac offered a retractable hardtop convertible version of its G6. And VW offered the Eos, a two-door based on the Golf/Jetta platform, with not only a retractable hardtop, but also a power sunroof.
This Eos has VW’s 2.0 liter turbocharged four under the hood, and six forward gears in its manual transmission. It’s a promising combination, but we know what Volkswagens of this era are like. It’s bound to have some electrical gremlins, and in fact the ad for this one says “Convertible top may not operate.” Well, at least it’s up now. But it is disappointing that its best party trick might not always work.
Otherwise, this ad is also maddeningly light on information. They do tell us it has new tires and brakes, and like the Mustang, it’s a one-owner car, and has a stack of service records going back to day one. It does look pretty good, except for a spot of rust on one front wheel well, and rust spots are like ants – you see one, you know there are more.
I do have to point out one funny thing on its dash: the information center shows that the left front and right rear doors are ajar. On a two-door car. Oh, Volkswagen…
Cars in cities tend to get used and abused; there’s not much point in having something “fun” if driving is going to be a chore, and there’s even less point in having something nice if it’s just going to get banged up. And yet, here are two reasonably fun, reasonably nice stickshift convertibles, right in one of the most densely populated areas onf the country. It goes to show that enthusiasm for cars can’t completely be damped by unfavorable conditions. Gearheadedness is a permanent condition, and we must have the fun cars. Which one of these are you going for?
(Image credits: Craigslist sellers)
Why would you want a manual for city driving, though?
Because they are more fun and engaging. I have had them for years in all sorts of traffic, on hills and all the things. As long as it’s not a crazy heavy clutch then I have never seen a reason why people make it sound like it’s so bad. I also find most autos fail miserably at anticipating what’s coming, so they shift up right as I am about to slow down, and then just have to shift again, whereas I can see the traffic and know that there’s no point in the upshift.
Fair points. For me, the constant use of the clutch in stop-and-go traffic is annoying. And it makes my left leg tired. That said … all the manuals I’ve ever owned have been complete shitboxes. Maybe in a nicer car it’s not so bad.
Yeah sounds like you had a heavier clutch than most of mine, or you just weren’t used to it. I have had everything from shitboxes (94 accord with a rattle can paint job) to an exotic (Lotus Elise) and drove them all daily without issue. My current stick shift is down at the moment, ok it’s been 9 months worth of moments, but it will be back soon and I can’t wait for it. I am so sick of my automatic
A lot of people say that, but I’ve driven a manual 97 Ranger in Chicago for going on 20 years and it’s never really been a hassle.
Honestly as long as the clutch is light, I enjoy a manual in the city. You can control your speed in stop and go traffic like a trucker- No need to constantly dive for the brake, which smooths things out for everyone, and means you actually switch pedals with your right foot LESS.
As someone who probably has some mild form of ADHD, shifting used to keep me alert and occupied on a dull, tiring commute.
The SN95 is my least favorite generation of Mustang (yes, even behind the Mustang II), but the mid cycle facelift did a lot to address its general blobbiness. Plus I can’t imagine having the patience to deal with a superannuated VW. It’ll be the Ford.
If these cars were near me, in suburbia, I would pick the Eos. I’ve got my own garage and am very familiar with VWs of this era, so sorting out the inevitable issue here and there isn’t the worst thing in the world (although issues with the top concern me). Plus I really like the platform that underpins the Eos.
But because they’re in New York and I likely would not have a garage if I lived there, I went with the Mustang since it’s probably less likely to give me trouble.
I’m a sucker for an American convertible, and always will be. Saddle up that little horse lemme ride them shimmering waves of black asphalt! Giddyup, haw!!!
I generally try to read the room in these ads. The Mustang has lived like a cockroach in a Brooklyn diner. It only has 5 legs but tremendous pesticide immunity from constant attempts to exterminate it. It might outlive us all. The EOS belonged to the daughter of a well-off Stamford family and spent so much of its time at the dealer that her daddy gave up and bought a real car. Her parents are trying to dump it. Both are a bundle of headaches. I voted for the EOS because it looks like a nicer place to sit while awaiting a wrecker.
‘Stang, though if both cars were new(er), I’d much prefer the Eos. Not a big fan of the ford’s styling, and am deeply distrustful of any car that has spent more than five minutes in NYC.
But the Mustang’s top is, at worst repairable and/or replaceable. If the Eos’s lid doesn’t work, that could be really unpleasant.
The Eos is a nicer driver, but the Ford will likely keep on driving for a long, long time. Depending, that is, on how much rot is nibbling at the metal underneath. And how often it has come in close contact with a NYC cab. Which, from my experience, is damn near inevitable.
All that said, the Eos’s top, if it works, is a real parlor trick. People stop and watch it going up and down.
I have a Jetta GLI from this era of VW and it’s not too bad once things are sorted out. There is a litany of failure prone parts but once those are replaced with upgraded versions it should be ok relatively speaking. The engine in ours came from an EOS. I voted Mustang.
My mom once had an SN95 convertible. The heater core started leaking at 20,000 miles. In spite of this personal anecdote of early 2000s Ford quality, I still voted for the Mustang.
Hey don’t worry, for the nostalgic among us, Ford quality evidently is unchanged since the early 00s!
It’s a feature, they do it just for the fans!
I just don’t get VW, as a brand. I’d rather have the same platform but cheaper with a Skoda or Seat badge, or show off that I can afford expensive unreliability and get the Audi version, if I were insane.
I also hate convertibles. But if I had to have one a non-functioning hardtop might be a bonus.
I can do skids in the Mustang, whereas all I can do in the VW is wait for more things to go wrong with it. Nope.
Plus I’m in the UK and bland VWs are everywhere.
I know this is all hypothetical but if you somehow did buy the Mustang its not like here in the US where you go to the closest auto parts store and buy dirt-cheap Ford parts. You would have to order stuff from the US instead which would be costly.
Is shipping Ford parts 5000 miles more expensive in total than shipping a much larger number of VW parts ten miles?
Why am I focusing on parts prices? I’ve just sold an old BMW and replaced it with a Lotus in the hope of the running costs staying about the same.
best thing about the Eos, is that even if the top will not retract, it’s still a sharp looking, nicely insulated and sealed coupe.
Although the styling is a little awkward, I’ve always found the Eos charming. And if, or when, the convertible hard top works, it’s one of the best values in its class that comes with that (sorta) feature. With this mileage, presumably in this condition, especially in this wacky market, that Eos is a bona fide steal.
Yes! Agreed…it looks good!
I feel like neither top works/is in good shape, so you’re buying a roadster, or a coupe. I do not have space for a fair weather only car, so I went coupe. Plus, I absolutely hate this body style mustang.
This is the easiest one of these in a while, and I personally think the new edge Mustang is hideous and has aged like milk. That does not matter in the slightest because it’s up against 2000s VW. I mean we can tell in the add that the car is already plagued by the run of the mill German electronic gremlins, and that’s just what we see on the surface.
On top of that we have to deal with a VAG turbo 4 with 6 figures of mileage. I believe this is an early version of the dreaded EA888. These things have tons of problems, and a 21st century German car with 100,000 miles might as well be any other car at 250,000+. They do not build cars that are designed last beyond 100k and many don’t even make it there at all.
I’m barely over a year removed from GTI ownership and only a few months removed from watching my mom’s Allroad mechanically total itself at 65,000 miles. And on top of the mechanical roof, we have a VW sunroof? Oh HELL no. Go to any Golf forum if you want an idea of how their sunroofs hold up. Or ask my sister, whose Tiguan’s sunroof went through multiple repairs and a recall that VW’s doofus techs didn’t catch when the certified the car.
I am never touching a VW again and would be hard pressed to even consider an Audi unless it was brand new and I was leasing it. Mustang for the win.
Bang on here. I had a coworker with an Eos, and good grief was it just issue after issue with it. Since it was still under warranty, a lot of the repairs were covered, but after the second replacement turbo, third or fourth time the hardtop assembly has to be rebuilt to fix the retraction mechanism or try to get the thing to seal up in the rain, and the countless electrical gremlins that caused stuff like a dead instrument cluster and door/window switch issues, even the VW dealer tried to talk my coworker into consulting a lemon law lawyer. My coworker commented that the service advisor said every Eos they sold seemed to have at least a large chunk of those same issues, so I can’t imagine how bad owning one out of warranty would be.
With that said, my coworker traded the Eos in on a similar year Passat VR6, and that thing was hardly without issues as well. My joke about my coworker suffering from Stockholm Syndrome went over poorly.
Everyone I know who’s owned VAG products has had issues. Like I said, my own GTI was so much of a headache that I got out of it after only two years. It had 3-4 unscheduled trips to the service bay for misfires in the first 5,000 miles. It also was already having electronic gremlins (cruise control just straight up didn’t work a good quarter of the time) and something in the ignition process was horribly wrong at around 12,000 miles.
My sister’s Tiguan had such chronic sunroof/flooding issues that she and her husband ditched it after only two years. As I said in my OG comment, my mom’s Allroad mechanically totaled itself at 65,000 miles, and she got that car because her previous A4 convertible’s top completely broke when the car was all of 6 years old and had 40,000 on the clock. It was either drop five figures to get the car fixed or eat some money and get something new.
I cannot for the life of me understand what draws people to VAG in our year of Satan 2023. I’m not even some reliability snob/self absorbed JDM cultist either, I own a damn Hyundai and the chances my next car is 6 or 8 cylinder Bimmer are far from 0. I’ve just had so much personal experience with their products having needless issues, and seemingly every reliability study that’s done ranks them at the bottom of the barrel too.
I also think it’s a cultural problem at the company. They seem perfectly content pumping out cars that aren’t designed to make it past 50,000 miles…which is utterly insane to me when most modern econoboxes can eclipse 100,000 with nothing but regular oil changes. It’s lunacy, and it’s wasteful.
You just gave me a flashback to a rental Passat I got circa 2015/2016. I thought I got an upgrade from my usual Corolla, especially since the Passat was loaded, still smelled new, and only had 1200 miles on the odometer. I was also excited because I had plans to trade in my Subaru on a Golf R when I returned from my trip.
However, the cruise control just straight didn’t work. Neither did the interior door lock switches. Only the power seat switch for the base worked, not the one for the seat back. The windshield wipers worked, but only on the slowest or fastest setting – anything in between just kept it on the slowest setting until you reached the fastest.
I know the life of a rental is a hard one, but it was absolutely insane how fast that car had fallen apart. My Subaru had 252,000 miles on a headgasket-eating EJ25 and a lifetime spent in the rust belt and it had less broken! In the end, I just couldn’t shake that experience and walked away from the Golf R.
If you’re buying a city beater, go for something with the cheapest parts you can find. Ze German auto will definitely have the more expensive parts in this matchup.
Remember talking to a Volkswagen tech friend of mine when the EOS was new. He thought they were a POS then especially the roof mechanism. I can’t imagine age has been kind to them so Mustang it is.
probably nothing, but what is that streaking on the rear seat interior panels? Has the top been down long enough for the pigeons to have bombed it that badly? Or leaky top, and it rained milk one day?
I like VW Eoses so much that I own one. I would not buy a used one, though, and certainly not this one.
This 2008 model comes from a time before the roof seals were redesigned to address leaking issues (I can’t remember the exact model year, but I think it’s 2010-12ish). Even with the new design, it’s important to lubricate the seals regularly to keep them soft and supple so they can do their job, but with the old design, leaks are much more likely. With the busted top on a car like this, you could wind up getting rained on in bad weather while being unable to bask in the sunshine on a nice day — all of the drawbacks of a convertible with none of the benefits.
As with most VWs of its era, maintenance is key, and there’s just no way of knowing what was done or not done by the previous owner(s). The bargain basement price suggests there might be some issues. This is the sort of car that I’d be more likely to want to buy if the price were higher.
I do prefer the styling of the Eos to that of the Mustang, and I’ll always choose a colorful car over a gray one, but that is a very subjective measure.
Also subjective is driving experience. The Eos is not a racecar, and it doesn’t try to be one. If you know this going in and it’s what you want, then you’re golden, but if you want to drive it like a Mustang, you’re going to have a bad time. That’s not to say that it’s a slow car or a bad driving one — mine has all the power I could want and plenty of grip in the turns. I just know that many Autopians prefer a sports car, and that’s just not what this is.
Like most car models, the Eos has a fiercely loyal albeit small fanbase who absolutely love their cars. If you like it and want one, you’d be better off picking one up from one of those owners who have loved and meticulously cared for it over its lifetime — not some rando trying to unload a problem child for a bargain basement price.
I believe it was 2012 for the roof seals. My 2011 sportwagen has sunroof seal issues, so I’m far more familiar with it than I want to be. I looked at one of these for my daughter, but I couldn’t really find one I felt like wouldn’t ultimately be more work than it was worth. Part, despite what seems to be the common belief, seem to be readily available and cheap if you know where to look. I just couldn’t really set aside the amount of work I knew it one would end up needing.
And yes, 100% it’s a maintenance thing with this era of VW. The previous generation was better (I took a Jetta up to 195k with no issues), but this specific one is a beast if you’re not actually looking after things and doing it on schedule. I’m on 125k right now and have already had to replace the entire gearbox, not to mention all of the emissions headaches (TDI), so I definitely would avoid this one, despite having a load of familiarity with the platform.
VW, I can smell that interior…
voted Mustang 🙂
The real thought exercise is wondering how bad a car would have to be to vote for a VW over it. This Mustang isn’t even close to that bad.
Mustang. I owned an Audi A4 at one point in my life. Don’t need to say much more right?
That beautiful VW two tone interior wins it for me, look at that design!!! it looks like the Mustang is stuck in the 80’s
Plus I’m stuck in NY in my parking garage so I need a hard top to keep the thieves away for a few seconds longer.
I’m sure I can get that clam shell to open up eventually…
My biggest concern about the top – is it actually manually real-world operable? Not only can the motor/drive be disengaged, but is it light enough for a single person to put up/down by themselves?
B/c it’s a VW, you know this is coming.
Knowing VW, there’s probably a crank somewhere to manually raise/lower it. But knowing cheap used cars, it has probably been AWOL since 2013 or so.
Mustang all the way. Not overly powerful but pretty simple and no end of aftermarket support. Both to pep up the V6 and general repair and maintenance parts. Buy and enjoy.
Mustang for sure. Not just b/c I own an earlier SN95, but also b/c his one looks largely unmolested, which is no mean feat for a base model at this point in time.
The wheels are the right ones, it’s the correct hood for that year, and also, the very rare version without the spoiler from the factory (seriously, by this time, seemingly every single Mustang had the spoiler). Hope the engine looks as good, but suspect it does.
I think the Mustang would at least be the most pleasant to drive,also possibly simpler to actually keep running. The Eos is also a nice car,but the top possibly not working is only a hint of the problems coming.
Ford wins over VW by default
Mustang. Full Stop.
It has everything going for it. Cheap, reliable, parts availability, aftermarket support.
The VW is going to be a headache…