Volkswagen Tiguan review

Avid followers of the automotive industry’s trials and tribulations might have clicked straight to this section, thirsty for tea. Volkswagen, ever the barometer of sense and pragmatism, somewhat threw its reputation to the wind when the Mk8 Golf and its various ID electric models swept almost every control, air con included, inside a touchscreen back in 2020.

Well, the Tiguan feels like a step on the journey to recovery, albeit a small one. Touchscreen operation still rules in here (it’s a mite 12.9 inches as standard on all versions, with a 15in screen part of an £1,100 options pack) while ChatGPT-boosted voice commands are designed to alleviate how often you flick your eyes from the screen to fiddle with stuff. But VW says it is learning from customer feedback, so it now wants to use physical buttons to enhance the experience alongside touchscreens.

Is it a success?

Well, we can only comment on the mahoosive 15in screen, but it’s big enough to fall mostly into your field of vision and largely operates without fuss. Burying the adjustment for brake regen deep in the menus of the PHEVs seems silly, but otherwise it’s easy enough to operate and while we still crave physical climate controls, the illuminated sliders here are okay. Just be careful not to press down for too long and accidentally kick the air con into its lowest or highest extremes.

The screen is configurable so you can have your most-used shortcuts up at the top which is useful for switching off overbearing safety systems, but the ChatGPT stuff is still work in progress and VW says it will be updated as the tech grows. For now, you can use it to operate stuff in the car with relative ease, but more obtuse commands are hit and miss. Throw it simple trivia and it can dig into Wikipedia and give you proper answers but ask it anything beyond cold, hard facts and it starts to flounder.

What about old fashioned ‘space’ and ‘comfort’?

There’s plenty of both. The Tiguan has barely grown in its jump from Mk2 to Mk3, all the better for parking it easily in cities – something the car can optionally do itself, even remotely for the last 50m of your journey – yet it’s also swelled the boot space by a useful 37 litres to a total of 652 with the rear seats still in place. That drops down to 490 litres in the eHybrid plug-ins, though all variants gain an additional 1,000 litres when you drop their back seats.

Keep ‘em up and there’s decent space for two adults, not least because VW has ensured there’s plenty of room for feet under the front seats (a common demerit in fully electric crossovers) plus 30mm of extra length in the wheelbase. The bench slides fore and aft and the seat backs can recline. Quality is pretty high too, with plush materials used where your eyes and hands most frequently fall and harder wearing plastics where they don’t.