First-class cabin!
Volkswagen passes the screen test, is great to drive, but is on the pricey side
THE first portable television I bought, for my bedroom when I still lived in the family home, was a 14-inch model I barely could see from my bed. It was fine if just one person’s head was in shot, but beyond that it was hopeless. Watching a movie with a battle scene was pointless – you had no idea who was who.
Fast forward 30 years, and the screen in the Volkswagen Touareg I’m driving actually is an inch bigger, and just centimetres away. Honestly, it is gorgeous, absolutely vast and instantly the class leader in any car, mainstream or premium. The colours are rich, you can control it with touch, voice command or even just a gesture, and far from dominating the fascia, it sits there as naturally as an ould fella nursing a pint of plain in a Liberties pub.
Add in the 12-inch digital instrument panel, and what you have is a work of beauty. Where it becomes transcendent is at night, when ambient lighting in a choice of 30 colours picks out all the horizontal lines on the interior, and creates an atmosphere that makes you just want to sit in the car in the driveway, and not open your front door at all. If I had to name my car of the year (and I will be, by the way, in this column on December 29) based solely on the cabin, the team from Wolfsburg could simply rock up right now and I’d happily hand them the trophy.
It’s not the only thing to love about the cabin, though. The seats also are huge, and hugely comfortable, and everything feels to hand exactly where you need it. There’s buckets of space in deep door pockets and the centre console, and attractive stitching on the seats.
The car is built on the same platform as the Audi Q7 and adheres to more or less the same dimensions. Where that car is a sevenseater, the Touareg is available only as five-seater, and what that means is that the space Audi uses for the third row here simply is cargo space. How much is there? A whopping 810 litres, compared with 650 litres in the BMW X5 I reviewed here last week. When you drop the rear seats, you effectively have added an extension to your house.
The only extra on my test car was metallic paint (€1,181), and everything else here is standard in the R-Line Design model.
That includes 20-inch Montero alloy wheel in Glam Silver, heated front seats, forward collision warning, park assist with park distance control (you’ll need it, because the car is almost five metres long), adaptive cruise with speed limiter and Stop &Go for autonomous driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic, high beam assist, panoramic sunroof, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a Dynaudio sound system, head-up display, electrically folding trailer hitch, leather multifunction steering wheel, and that truly awesome Innovision cockpit with active info display and customisable instrument layout, as well as satnav maps right in front of you.
For such a big car, it also drives very well. The suspension is well adjusted, and roll control means it stays upright in corners with little in the way of pitch. The 3.0-litre V6 turbodiesel engine shoots it off the blocks to 100kph in just 6.1 seconds and at motorway speed, there is no evidence of noise, harshness and vibration.
In short, and I don’t say this lightly, the new Touareg is way up there with the best SUVs on the road right now, and it looks the part too, a masterpiece of VW unfussiness that presents as solidly as your best friend in a crisis.
At 182g/km, emissions are going to put you in the €750 a year motor tax bracket, and fuel consumption is 6.9 litres per 100km.
The only issue outstanding is the price. Look, I loved this car beyond measure and had a ball driving it, but boy is it expensive. The base Touareg checks in at €65,395, but this test car costs €86,151 excluding delivery and related charges.
Personally, I’d be happy to pay for what you get here if I had the money – but if indeed I had the money, would I be buying a Volkswagen? That’s a philosophical question and the answer will owe as much to snobbery as it does to logic. It’s certainly a lot more than I paid for that portable television all those years ago, but when it comes to sheer pleasure, there really is no comparison.