Volkswagen has sold a million T-Rocs, and this is the new one

You want a stat that demonstrates how many more people spend their 20-odd grand on a crossover rather than a sports car? The Volkswagen T-Roc has surpassed one million sales in its four years on this planet thus far. The Mazda MX-5 took 27 years to hit the same milestone.

The T-Roc is an especially stark example. This thing is ‘a firm component of Volkswagen's model range’, aka it sells big. So it’s little surprise to see its mid-life facelift is pretty tame. Yes, they’ve even kept the Cabriolet on sale.

We’ll start on the outside, where it wears – to quote yet more verbose VW spiel – ‘precise exterior accentuations’. These include darkened rear lights and new standard LED headlights (with Matrix LEDs optional) with an arguably naff lighting strip dissecting the grille that makes its way here from the Golf. There are new colours and alloy wheel designs.

Heading inside, the materials are now all softer to touch – hopefully amending the surprisingly cheap cockpit of the outgoing T-Roc – while digital dials are now standard, measuring 8in in the stock T-Roc, 10in in the T-Roc R. The middle touchscreen has grown and houses the latest grade of infotainment software. It’s ‘always online’ as an option, which sounds mildly terrifying but is potentially quite helpful, while Apple CarPlay and Android Auto now operate wirelessly should you wish.

Predictive cruise control is plumbed right into the nav and anticipates junctions and suchlike, drawing in assisted steering, braking and acceleration up to 130mph. A surprisingly thorough grade of self-driving help, then. Meanwhile the park assist system now works forwards as well as backwards.

Actually worried about commandeering the car yourself? The stock T-Roc offers three petrol engines (a 108bhp 1.0-litre 3cyl, 148bhp 1.5-litre 4cyl and 187bhp 2.0-litre 4cyl) and two diesels (both 2.0-ltre 4cyl with either 113 or 148bhp) with six-speed manual or seven-speed DSG automatic gearboxes strapped to them. If you want the semi-self-driving tech, you need DSG.

The drop-top only offers the two smaller petrols – both front-driven manuals as standard, with DSG optional on the 1.5-litre – but gets its own colour options as compensation.

The T-Roc R sits atop them all, hooking up a 296bhp 4cyl turbo engine to all four wheels via standard DSG. If you want four-wheel drive without hot hatch power, it’s available on the 187bhp petrol and 148bhp diesel.

On which note, the R has enjoyed its own updates, though the recipe hasn’t changed one bit. Its 2.0-litre petrol turbo still boasts 296bhp/295lb ft peaks, the latter delivered at just 2,000rpm making it good for 0-62mph in 4.9secs with the help of launch control. VW is eager to tell us the stability control can be deactivated with a manual button push, almost as if to answer all the complaints the latest Golf hot hatches don’t offer such a thing.

Blue brake calipers and a unique LED light design mark it out as a real R outside (handy given the R-Line trim mimics the full-fat R more than ever) while an interior best described as ‘somewhat blue’ does the same job inside. An Akrapovic exhaust system is optional, perhaps cloyingly, but if you prefer the rear bumper of your 4x4 crossover to have some semblance of sense to it then VW assures us you can fit a tow bar. Phew.