We’ve now passed 100 km at the end of our first week of ownership and, I must say, the Sharan is proving to be a very pleasant car to drive.

As suspected, although I can play Spotify from my Nexus One over the car’s speaker system, I can only play, stop, rewind and fast-forward. I can’t even see the name of the track that is playing, or who it is by. Still, being able to listen to Spotify in the car at all still has huge novelty value for me, so I’m happy.

Here, Eloïse poses next to the skeleton of a camarasaurus.

But would it really allow me to play from the Spotify client? The surprising answer — surprising to me, anyway — is yes. Thanks to A2DP, I was able to listen to Spotify through the car speakers. I forgot to check whether I could control the Spotify client in any meaningful way from the car’s controls, but I very much doubt it. If I can control it at all, I’m sure it will be no more than play, stop, rewind and fast-forward.

Of course, this requires a 3G data connection, which I have, but that would get expensive very quickly over the border. For local driving, however, it’ll be a very useful feature. Since our new car doesn’t even have a CD player, having the ability to stream from Spotify provides a necessary alternative.

And, with the new car parked outside, sliding doors and a storage system for Eloïse’s diverse stuff manage to compensate somewhat for the loss of her old friend, the A6.

Get the full story.

We said goodbye to our faithful Audi A6 Avant, which had served us well across more than 30 countries, and said hello to henpecked middle-class fartiness in the form of an MPV, the class of car that you wish you never had to buy, but can no longer avoid as the family outgrows anything that doesn’t look like a box on wheels.

Actually, the renewed Volkswagen Sharan is a prince amongst MPVs and I’m sure we’ll grow attached to it in time as it takes us all over Europe, but for now, I share Eloïse’s sadness at having to say farewell to what has been a constant in our lives over the last 5½ years.

Our Audi A6 Avant has served us well, transporting us to approximately 30 European countries over the last five years, but it’s just not big enough for long family holidays with five people and all of the accoutrements that accompany them. Even with just four people, it’s becoming a squeeze. Eloïse isn’t a baby any more and needs more of her own stuff than she used to. Lucas is developing, too, so we really need something with more room. Besides which, the middle seat on the rear bench isn’t ISOFIX-ready, so you can’t secure a child seat to the chassis in that position.

We’ve settled on a Volkswagen Sharan, because this type was recently the subject of a comprehensive revision and now has some very economical engines to choose from. The energy label of our A6 Avant was a D, if I remember correctly. The new car will be a B, even with an automatic gearbox on board. OK, there’s only a 1.4 litre petrol engine at its heart, but that energy label is still pretty amazing for a car of this size. We’ll be sacrificing some power, but that’s OK. After a test drive, I’m willing to bet that we’ll only really appreciate the difference on the German autobahn.

You don’t pick an MPV to be sporty; you pick it to be practical. As such, we resisted the temptation to go straight for the 2.0 litre model, as that lacks Volkswagen’s efficient BlueMotion technology, which makes it a much cleaner car to run, in terms of CO₂ emissions. BlueMotion also makes it more economical, of course. The lower emissions mean that we can knock off about five grand in heinous Dutch BPM tax, which was ratcheted up to astronomic levels at the start of this year. Some car manufacturers have even felt the need to entirely withdraw several of their models from the Dutch market, because the price of the car increased by about €15,000 in extra BPM tax on 1st January. That’s substantial enough to price many an MPV way out of its target segment.

With the expectation of the continued raising of penalties for cars with anything but mint on their breath, we have to be mindful of resale value a few years from now. If the 2.0 litre model gives us pause for thought now, it may have become very unattractive as an exchange or resale vehicle four or five years down the road. On the other hand, I’m confident we’ll still be able to shift a B label MPV, because the competition is still quite some way behind in producing clean, efficient engines.

In contrast, The 2.0 litre diesel model does have BlueMotion and doesn’t come with the same BPM burden, but diesel vehicles are penalised in other ways here, so it’s not economically viable to own one unless you drive close to 30,000 km per year. We manage about a third of that, so the only sensible choice for us is a petrol engine.

I’d been dreading the day that we were faced with the inevitable prospect of entering MPV land. If there’s one type of car that isn’t appealing, it’s the frumpy, oversized MPV, devoid of luxury and no fun to drive.

Closer inspection of some MPVs, such as the Ford Galaxy, confirmed this analysis. That car feels as if it was constructed from a kit by an enthusiastic amateur. It just feels so cheap and nasty. Everything is made from rattly plastic and it feels as if a chunk could break off in your hand at any moment. This is, of course, a problem with American cars in general. It must surely be one of the motoring world’s greatest irony that the country most obsessed with luxury and cars seemingly can’t produce a luxurious vehicle for the mass market.

The Sharan has a lot of very appealing features, but I’ll name just the highlights:

• Energy label B for the 1.4 litre petrol model with automatic DSG gearbox.
• Modern satellite navigation system.
• A decent 8 speaker sound system.
• 7 seats across 3 rows: all 3 in the middle row and both in the back row have ISOFIX mount points. The 2 edge seats in the middle row also have built-in child booster seats.
• All seats can be folded completely flat, leaving them recessed in the floor to create extra space for luggage.
• Huge, front-to-back panoramic sunroof.
• Electrically sliding back doors and boot hatch.
• Keyless entry.
• Side airbags in the front and back (at extra cost).
• A decent EURO NCAP score.

I’ve gone from dreading the transition to an MPV to really looking forward to taking receipt of the Sharan in July. I really think this is going to be a lot of fun to own and drive. The children will have plenty of room for their stuff and there are lots of places to store stray items in the cabin. We’ll likely get a multimedia system built into the rear seats, so that the children can watch DVDs during the journey. They’re getting old enough now that playing with a length of string or a pebble no longer holds their concentration in quite the same way it used to.

For one thing, the new car will give us the option of going on trips when visitors come. Currently, we can transport our children or our visitors, but not both. That will change with the new vehicle.

Parking it will be harder, of course, and it may not even fit through our gateposts, so we’re just going to have to try it. Even if it doesn’t fit, you can’t choose a vehicle based on your gate, so we’ll just have to live with the problem.

Eloïse has already cried at the idea of no longer having the car to which she’s become so accustomed. It’s been with us for all of her remembered life, so she can’t imagine being without it. On the other hand, she grins like a Cheshire cat at the prospect of sliding doors and being able to sit all the way at the back of the car, so hopefully the new vehicle will bring enough excitement with it that she can cope with the loss of the old.

Audi didn’t manage to find the problem with the wing mirrors not folding in or out. They can’t have looked very hard, though, because my trusty laptop and magic cable took just a couple of minutes to determine that there is an intermittent “short to ground” in the mirror motors of both the driver and passenger doors. Of course, Audi’s bill for their trouble, which arrived today, includes a labour charge for time spent investigating the problem. Right. I don’t think so. I’ll have to get that sorted out when we get back.

I’ve just burned a pile of CDs to keep Eloïse amused in the car. We considered giving her her own digital music player, but I don’t like the idea of isolating family members behind a set of headphones. I’d rather pay the price of having to listen to her music while I drive than lose the ability to talk to her about the trip ahead and the things we see passing by the window.

I realise now that I never blogged about my impressions of Disneyland in Paris.

Well, it struck me as a rather surreal form of concentration camp, in which victims of commercial indoctrination voluntarily incarcerate themselves for multiple days at a time. Hard labour in the form of endless queueing is then the order of the day, sustained by a shamefully poor diet whose caloric content is inversely proportional to its nutritional value.

In short, Disneyland is best enjoyed if you find yourself gently hovering somewhere between the predicates ‘moron’ and ‘idiot’. If you have a double digit IQ or a single digit age, Disneyland is the place for you; as long as you have a quadruple digit budget, that is.

The worst cases, the irretrievably insane, can be easily spotted: they are the ones unaccompanied by children. What these people are doing there is anybody’s guess.

As I probably wrote at the time, though, Eloïse had a great time, although even she was saying that she wanted to go home on the last day. She even rode the Tower of Terror a couple of times, a ride that had grown men screaming.

We have a five hour drive ahead of us tomorrow to Kiel in Germany. It might not sound like much, but it’s long enough with a baby in the car. Speaking of Lucas, we bought him a pair of sunglasses today, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll be prepared to leave them on.

The fan in the car actually started growling after I made the appointment to have the airco checked over, as if the car knew that now was the time to start throwing in the towel.

At the start of the drive here, the electrically driven side mirrors decided not to fold in or out any more, so now those have to be looked at, too. The more electronics in a car (or anything else, for that matter), the more that go wrong. Still, better now than a week from now, when we’ll be in the Baltics.

I wanted to title this entry Waiting Room, but the computer here wanted to complete the title for me, revealing that I must have used that title the last time I blogged from here. I’m nothing if not consistent, is one possible conclusion.

In the case of the Baltic states, I knew that these countries weren’t covered at all by our system. That’s hardly surprising, because the DVD containing the maps identifies itself as being for western Europe.

That rather implies that there are other DVDs available for other regions of the continent, so I went looking on-line to see if I could find a reference to one for the area in which we’re interested.

I soon made the pleasant discovery that the 2009 Audi navigation DVD has an expanded country list that includes the Baltic states. The bad news is that Audi charges a ridiculous amount of money for an a copy of the uodated DVD: between €200-300, depending on how generous they’re feeling.

I paid this fee a couple of years ago, when Audi were offering a special deal, whereby they would update your MMI (Multi Media Interface, the car’s software user interface) to the latest version and supply you with the latest sat-nav DVD for a single, reduced price . This combination deal was being offered because Audi had just released a localised MMI translation for the Dutch market, along with spoken navigation directions in the Dutch language.

This isn’t the kind of money I feel is reasonable to demand for annual incremental improvements to the map coverage, however, so I decided that I would scout around on-line and try to find a copy of the 2009 DVD by other means.

As you might expect. it didn’t take very long.

Whilst looking for the item in question, I also discovered that my MMI was now long out-of-date; hardly surprising, really, since it had been two years since Audi performed the last one.

So, in addition to the DVD image I’d found, I also downloaded three CD images containing the latest MMI software. With information gleaned from a couple of Audi Web forums, I now possessed the necessary knowledge to initiate the update process.

Flashing your digital camera or PlayStation is one thing, but the prospect of bricking one’s car had me slightly more nervous than I would normally be at the prospect of installing new firmware on a piece of hardware. My nervousness only increased as the update got under way, with the software issuing grave warnings against causing any fluctuations in the supply voltage, for example by operating the windows or sun-roof.

Everything went smoothly, however, and I can report that our car is now running the very latest version of the MMI: 55.7.0 0835.

Immeasurably more pleasing, however, is that our sat-nav now boasts coverage of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Quite how good that coverage actually is, though, will become apparent in a matter of a week or so. I suspect that only certain cities will be covered, with few, if any, interconnecting roads. Still, anything’s better than nothing.

While searching for information on Audi MMI software updates, I came across a couple of interesting postings that indicated that one’s battery charge level indicator could disappear from the MMI after applying an update. This was interesting to me, because mine had disappeared two years earlier when Audi applied the last update.

I had noticed this immediately and queried Audi as to the reason. They told me that the battery meter had been removed from the latest version of the software, because it was considered unreliable.

Imagine my surprise when I read in this Audi enthusiasts’ forum that the loss of the battery meter was actually an expected, if undesirable side-effect of applying the MMI update, and that an Audi technical service bulletin (TSB), issued at the time to guide official Audi mechanics through the specifics of the new software release, indicates that the battery meter is turned off by default in the new version. In other words, it needs to be reenabled after updating.

Not only that, but a second MMI feature that allows instrument cluster settings to be modified turned out to have disappeared at the same time as the battery meter. I never use that menu, though, so I’d never noticed that it was missing until I read about it in the forum.

The main point here, of course, is that Audi had carried out the update improperly. The two features in question should have been manually restored after updating the MMI two years ago. Does no-one RTFM these days?

Further reading taught me that the missing features can be restored without the intervention of an Audi dealer. One needs only a laptop, some software and the means to connect the laptop to the car.

Needless to say, the prospect of being able to hack my own car was one that I stoically managed to resist for all of 24 hours.

Within a few days, the required cable had arrived from the US and I excitedly headed out to the car to connect my laptop to the same port used by Audi dealers to connect their much more expensive VAS 5051/5052 diagnostic computers.

A few minutes later, the missing menu entries were restored. I also took the time to enable a hidden MMI menu that allows access to a number of low level MMI settings. I can get to this menu now by holding down the CAR + SETUP buttons for five seconds.

Finally, I ran a diagnostics check of all of the control modules installed in the car. Checking these is the first thing Audi does if you take your car to the garage with some kind of complaint. Of course, Audi charges by the hour, so time spent diagnosing problems costs you as much as time spent fixing them. Using my new gear, I can find out which modules, if any, are indicating faults, before I even call Audi to make an appointment.

As it turns out, I found multiple fault conditions that Audi had failed to clear on previous visits to the garage, including some caused by them when they had decoupled certain systems in order to work on the car.

Normally, one has no insight into this kind of thing and simply has to assume that everything is being performed expertly and by the book. The missing MMI features and the failure to clear fault conditions indicate to me that the situation at an average Audi garage isn’t any better than at any other place where one would hope to find technical expertise and methodical work practices.

As usual, if you want a job done well, you have to do it yourself. There’s a very real limit to my expertise with the car, of course and tt ends well before the electronics turn into the mechanics. It’s not as if I don’t need the garage any more. On the other hand, I have, at least, managed to fix the problem that I set out to fix.

If I had called Audi about the problem, it’s possible they would have continued to claim that the menus in question were no longer available in this release of the software. It’s equally plausible that they might have been reluctant to hook up the car to their computer to fix the problem. And, of course, it’s not unthinkable that they might have simply been unable to fix it, due to the same lack of knowledge that caused the problem in the first place. It would be an awkward conversation in which I had to refer Audi to their own internal bulletin in order to educate them about the solution for my problem.

From my little excursion into the inner workings of the car’s brain, it’s clear that a good mechanic has to be at least as competent in the field of system administration. That’s hardly surprising, of course, because for years now, computers have been taking over more and more functions of the car and an increasingly large number of faults can now be diagnosed with and fixed in software alone.

Unfortunately, the ever-expanding skill set required to maintain the modern car obviously isn’t something that we, the consumer, can take for granted. For that reason, being able to make simple changes in software and run diagnostic checks is a very welcome addition to the home toolbox, to say nothing of the satisfying hacker experience of hooking up a laptop to your car.

Outside, it’s rainy, the first rainy day we’ve had in a week, more or less. Florence and Mike, Sarah’s parents, always assure us of good weather when they visit.

I’ve spent most of the week coding, adding signature authentication to Ruby/AWS, and fixing the massive breakage caused to my MythTV grabber by UPC’s complete overhaul of their on-line TV guide. This second project is rather urgent and has consumed rather a lot of hours, as many users have been left out in the cold by UPC’s changes. That’s the inherently problematic nature of a screen-scraper for you.

Across from me, a brand-spanking-new, black 5.2 litre V10 Audi R8 beckons to be test-driven. I don’t usually go in for short-dick-man cars, but this one’s a beauty, and a snip at just under €250,000. However, much like the computer used by Little Britain’s sullen receptionist cum travel-agent, Sarah says, “No.”

She’s right, of course. I have enough difficulty keeping the battery charged on our current car, because it doesn’t get driven even once a week at the moment. An R8, as nice as it is, would undergo a brief period of gratuitous daily driving and then sit and rot in the driveway.

When I do need to drive, it’s usually with the whole family in tow, so what use is a two-seater?

But dreaming is gratis, right?

The car emerged two hours and a few CD downloads later, sporting version C6-HU 34.6.0 0647 of the MMI software (hitherto C6-HU 21.2.0 0534, in case you wondered). As if by magic, the car now also speaks Dutch (and a few other new languages, such as Portuguese and Russian) when instructing me how to get from A to B.

The navigation system now offers a 3D view, with the camera angle slightly tilted to give the impression of being somewhat elevated above the ground. Perhaps the software update has added other useful new features, but I didn’t encounter them on the short drive home.

The new 3D view is nice, because the viewing angle compacts the field of view, which means one can see more of the surrounding area than when in 2D, even when the zoom is set identically, say at 400m.

It also works well with ‘junction zoom’, whereby the system zooms in ever closer as one approaches a junction at which a new manoeuvre is required, such as turning left or right.

The only thing I don’t like about the 3D view is that most streets don’t have their name displayed along them, which is the case at the same zoom level in the 2D view. It also seems impossible to obtain north orientation for the map (even though you can configure it for same), probably to avoid confusion or perhaps impractically sharp viewing angles when travelling east or west. Who knows?

Since Audi had a special offer going, I took the opportunity to avail myself of the latest Western Europe DVD for the sat-nav system, too, so perhaps the woman with the dulcet tones will now be less determined to send me via the perpetually languid Overtoom when I ask for directions to pretty much any destination inside the ring (A10).

Poland and Hungary have been added to the list of countries for which there are maps and guidance data, which could prove handy. Hungary would have been good to have a year ago, but at least we’re now covered if we choose to return.

It’s strange to witness a car being rebooted and reprogrammed, as I tend to still think of them as predominantly mechanical machines, but they’ve really been powerful computers on wheels for quite a long time now. Nevertheless, it still amuses me to think that a car can be improved and have features added by installing a new version of the software.

Similarly, it can have new bugs introduced in the same way, so I hope not too many of those have crept in.