Volkswagen Taigo review

There’s good and bad inside the Taigo, so let’s start with what we like. The steering wheel is a good size and shape, and you get proper buttons, as opposed to the awkward touch-sensitive things found elsewhere in the VW Group.

You also get a separate panel for the climate controls, which in the lower specs consist of easy-to-use buttons and knobs. A victory for common sense. But in the upper trims it’s an unintuitive touch-button one with sliders. Ugh. Better than being dumped into the infotainment system, cough pre-facelift Mk8 Golf.

Despite the chopped roofline the two-tiered boot is still an impressive size. At 440 litres with the seats up (or 1,222 litres with them down) it’s just shy of the boxier T-Cross for rear space and more or less on par with the T-Roc. Bigger too than you’ll find in the Seat Arona, Nissan Juke and Renault Captur, though it does lose out to the Ford Puma here.

Is the cabin nice?

Iit all just feels a little… cheap and uninspired. The seats aren’t the most comfortable and there’s a lot of hard plastic in here, from the dash to the centre console (though we like the thoughtful, different size cupholders) and the single-piece door panels. Spare a thought for rear seat passengers, who don’t even get a fabric armrest. Leg room, fortunately, is adequate, and with four USB ports – two front, two rear – and wireless charging as standard, passengers won’t be able to complain about a lack of battery power. As long as, that is, they’ve got their USB-C adapter with them.

Otherwise there’s the usual VW tech gripe: you get an 8in instrument cluster as standard, but it looks a little lost in the space for the larger 10.25in unit, and the infotainment system is laggy and can be confusing to operate. In our experience the Apple CarPlay connection is far from seamless as well, freezing and dropping connection on more than one occasion when we tried it.

Oh, and one final thing: visibility has been compromised for the sake of style. Those are some fairly chunky C pillars to put up with when reversing.