Volkswagen Tiguan Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Volkswagen Tiguan range
Prices: £20,515-£25,300 – on the road
Insurance Group: 9-11
Emissions: 139-199g/km
Performance: [1.4TSI 150] 0-60mph 9.3s / max speed 122mph
Fuel Consumption: [1.4TSI 150] (urban) 26.6mpg (extra urban) 40.4mpg / (combined) 33.6mpg
Safety: ABS, ESP, six airbags
Dimensions: length/width/heightmm 4427/1809/1686

GOLF BUGGY

Our Rating: 7.3 / 10

It was only a matter of time before Volkswagen took what it learned from the Touareg luxury 4x4 and adapted it for the compact 4x4 sector. Steve Walker says hello to the Tiguan

Car manufacturers can look like a bunch of kids sometimes, just because one’s got something, all the others have to have one too. It’s through this process that the UK market has found itself swimming in compact 4x4 vehicles with every marque struggling to get its own take on the in vogue soft-roader theme into its showrooms. Even brands with no apparent previous interest in four-wheel-drive are coming over all Ray Mears on us and trying to pass themselves off as rugged, insect munching backwoodsmen.

There’s more to this, of course, than a corporate version of simple playground one-upmanship. The manufacturers are battling to tap into a key growth area in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Volkswagen’s effort is called the Tiguan. Think of it as a Golf in kaki shorts and cowboy hat.

The secret of the Volkswagen Tiguan’s arrival was about as well kept as David Bellamy’s back garden. Even if thinly disguised pictures of the vehicle hadn’t surfaced in the press and journalists hadn’t been allowed to drive one through the Namibian wilderness, most commentators could have had a pretty good guess that a VW-badged compact 4x4 was in the offing for the simple reason that virtually every mainstream marque that didn’t already have a compact 4x4 was in the process of building one.

The information put out by Volkswagen when it did put its hands up to the Tiguan was interesting in the way it differed from the standard compact 4x4 blurb. There was talk of entry and departure angles, hill descent control and electronically locking differentials. Was this a compact 4x4 that could actually do the business off-road?

Every engine in the Tiguan line-up is turbocharged or supercharged and turbocharged so pulling power shouldn’t be in short supply. The units are a familiar bunch with the 140PS 2.0 TDI diesel likely to be the best seller. Alternatively, there’s the groundbreaking turbocharged and supercharged petrol engine that manages to extract 150PS from its 1.4-litre capacity. These are the main two engines available but your dealer will also happily take orders for a range of other powerplants also developed for this car. These include a 170PD 2.0 TDI unit, plus two other 2.0 TSI petrol units, developing either 170 or 200PS. There isn’t a bad engine amongst them but the TSI units in particular really are ahead of their time.

Whether the Tiguan is any good off-road will be an irrelevance to most UK buyers - akin to the question of whether they could row their supermini across the channel. Despite our growing affection for 4x4 vehicles, we don’t take them off-road very much and people that do make regular forays into the undergrowth make damn sure they do so a Land Rover Defender or something similarly rugged. That said, off-road ability has become a little bit of a badge of honour for compact 4x4s. Buyers don’t need it but they’d like the model they choose to have it all the same. The 4x4 Tiguan uses the basic Haldex all-wheel-drive system from the Golf 4MOTION models but with a wider track and ground clearance increased to 189mm. More importantly, it has a nice line in electronic trickery to help it out of sticky situations.

The car is largely as you would expect a Volkswagen off-roader to look, the marque not known for its radical styling departures. The glasshouse is a good deal narrower than the lower section of the car which fills out at the shoulder line to chunky effect. There might even be a hint of Porsche Cayenne about the rear view. Inside, the design is lifted directly from the Golf and Golf Plus models so you know it’s going to have that Volkswagen air of quality