Volkswagen Arteon A perfect balm for road testers
Driver profiling helps make the most of our Arteon’s assistance features
MILEAGE 6177 WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To see if a cut-price luxury offering can be as urbane to live with as it is to look at
The Arteon had been away doing what it does best for other people these past few weeks, but I’ve got it back, removed the grime and detritus and made it feel like home again.
It’s racked up 6000 miles now, and most of those will have been passed in quiet, comfortable, ultraundemanding calm. The Arteon, we’ve learned, isn’t great at making those miles seem very special or interesting (partly because it’s a pretty humbly equipped car with one of the lesser-powered engines available), but it asks almost nothing of you, either, beyond a tank of unleaded every 500 miles or so and enough of your attention to keep it from mishap. It is exactly the kind of refined, easy-going, middle-distance muncher that the Autocar road tester needs to act as balm for the shorter, sharper, noisier, high-energy blasts in the Mclaren Sennas, Bowler Bulldogs and Ariel Atoms which constitute our day job (and which we wouldn’t change one bit, by the way).
And the Arteon isn’t just good at soothing your day away; it’s also uncommonly good at being passed from pillar to post. On the road, the car’s driver assistance features work better than many rival systems I’ve tested of late. The ‘front assist’ crash avoidance and mitigation system isn’t overly sensitive or easily spooked. The ‘lane assist’ system will let the car wander within its own lane a little, only stopping it from straying outside of it – but that means it doesn’t continually wrestle with you for fine directional control via the steering wheel rim, and that in turn keeps your attention on the road, where it should be.
The function and integration of the car’s driver assistance systems, and your appreciation of them, is made drastically better by something I’ve never really bothered with before but for which I’ve now seen the light. Have you ever selected or configured a personal driver profile on a modern car? If not, and you can, I heartily recommend it (I know you can on most current BMWS, for example).
The Arteon asks you to select your driver profile just after you’ve got into the driver’s seat and done up your belt: a prompt pops up on the digital instrument screen and you select your name from a list using the controls on the steering wheel.
And once you’ve done that, no matter who was driving your car last, it instantly feels like yours again. The instrument display mode reverts to how you last left it. The air conditioning controls adapt to your taste on temperature and fan speed. The stereo reselects your favourite radio station. The navigation system remembers your ‘home’ address and map configuration preference. And the driver assistance systems, which are increasingly complex things, switch back to how you like them.
I have 20deg C set on the climate control, for example (no odd number or, god forbid, decimal places, you freaks) as well as a north-up navigation map at a usefully wide scale (auto-zoom switched off, no voice guidance). I also like to use adaptive cruise control at a good long distance from the car in front, and ‘lane assist’ only when on the motorway. I usually like to drive in ‘Eco’ mode on the road, though that’s highly car-dependent. But it drives me potty when, for the sake of scoring that extra Euro NCAP active safety credit, a car’s lane keeping system switches back on every time you restart the car – and that has been happening a lot in things I’ve driven recently.
It happens in the Arteon, too, but only if you leave the selected driver profile on ‘guest’ (the one it defaults to if you don’t select your own). Deactivate lane assist in your own mode and it stays off forever therein.
Knowing all this makes my inner pedant much less agitated, I must say, and is yet more evidence of the way Volkswagen sweats the small stuff to make for an agreeable and relaxing overall driving experience.