It would be possible, I suppose, not to enjoy driving the new VW Beetle Cabriolet, but you would have to try pretty hard. I just spent a week doing my picky utmost to have a bad time in this screamingly cute convertible and failed miserably.

So here, for the sake of a critical perspective, is a complete list of the drawbacks that did occur to me to be inherent in the new topless Beetle and which might just, taken whole, constitute a sustainable argument for not ordering one within the next, ooh, half-hour or so.

1 The seatbelt. When retracted, it sits flush against the metalwork of the side of the car, so nonchalantly reaching back for it over your right shoulder, as you might do with a conventional belt in a suspended brace or hanger, is often slightly complicated and you sometimes have to swivel round with your left hand and pick the belt off the metal a bit. This could add as much as 1.5 seconds to your journey time on a bad day.

2 The boot. It's not all that capacious. Indeed, if you're storing the tonneau cover in there (the protective wrapper which fits very easily over the folded back roof for those longer, windier journeys), there is only just about room left over for a medium-sized roasting chicken. Without giblets.

3 The cup-holders. The pair of them are perfectly deep and stable but they are situated at floor level beneath the central dash console, which overhangs them. Which means that, though a regular latte can be dropped into one of the holders with ease, a grande latte has to be tilted slightly in order to make it under the ridge. Not so much, however, that any of the contents actually spills or anything. (Note: test was carried out using standard-issue drinks cartons purchased at a branch of the Caffe Nero coffee chain. Size of cartons used by other suppliers may vary.)

4 There is no four.

I did try to find one. I attempted to attack the car where it was most vulnerable. I drove it at speed with the roof off and waited for the howling to become so intolerable that I needed to rest in a lay-by for 20 minutes until the trembling stopped. I put small children in it and waited. And what happened? Nothing intolerable at all.

With the roof off and the windows up, you feel pleasantly cocooned and refreshed at the same time. For increased natural ambience, and a far higher possibility of being deafened by wind pressure, you can drop all four of the side windows with the press of a single button. Even then, you're not going to get your head blown off unless you stand up, which is never advisable anyway, particularly if driving. As for children, they don't get an awful lot of room back there, to be honest, but nevertheless they seem to think the convertible Beetle is the best joke they've ever heard.

Thwarted at a practical level, I resorted to disenchanting myself by examining the car for potentially unwelcome messages: the possibility of an association between the Beetle's jelly-mould shape and a kind of deep-seated infantilism in the driver, for example; or the thought that people would automatically assume I was a hairdresser. I could make none of these things stick - or certainly not enough to care a fig about them. I was having too nice a time.

Most soft-top convertibles seem like a good idea at the time. But the goodness of the idea tends to evaporate somewhat shortly after removing and replacing the roof for the first time - especially if the replacement has happened in a rain storm. There is almost no soft-top in existence the removal of which doesn't require one to risk one's entire hand in the guillotine of a sprung-metal fastener or rupture the ligaments in one's elbow attempting to heave a recalcitrant popper on to its knob.

The Beetle's roof mechanism could not be simpler or more obliging unless they sent someone along with the car to do it for you. You reach above the rear-view mirror and press a large plastic pad (marked "press" to remove completely the possibility of confusion). An unignorable plastic handle pops out. You give the handle a twist and the roof satisfyingly uncouples.

Then you hold your finger on a button and the car's electrics do everything else, lifting and stowing the canvas in a tall and quite steeply angled package behind you, redolent of the convertible Beetles of yore, when the cars had their engines in the back, rattled like industrial fan heaters and were driven exclusively by German anarcho-syndicalists and members of the Fab Four. (Those classic old-style Beetles are still built in Mexico, incidentally - but only until tomorrow, when the line finally closes.)

Getting the roof back on, by the way, requires the same near-absence of effort. I've had harder times closing a carton of milk. And pretty much everything else about the car takes its cue from the roof - the gears and pedals are fluid, the steering easy but precise. Go ahead. Hate it. See if you can.