Styling
The current Volkswagen corporate styling is for the swoopy, with kind of snub-nosed front ends on its latest ICE cars that mimic the all-electric
ID. models in the company's portfolio. The thing is, with a
few exceptions, Volkswagen's ID. cars haven't been widely welcomed for their appearance and the Mk3 Tiguan just seems to have lost some of the aesthetic crispness, a snifter of the visual punch of its predecessor. We remember how good a Mk2 Tiguan looked
in R-Line specification, all sharp edges and understated aggression, and while the latest version in the same trim grade does get some big, beefy cross-hatched plastic inserts in its front and rear bumpers, plus lots of black exterior detailing (a £1,255 option pack, admittedly), its look is somehow far more apologetic than that of the SUV it supersedes. The Tiguan is particularly anonymous from the back, where even a full-width light strip -
the most prevalent design feature of the 2020s automotive sphere - doesn't really give it much identity. Prise the badges off the Volkswagen and you wouldn't be entirely clear which manufacturer it came from, put it that way.
Interior
Anything on the MQB evo platform launched in the past year or so immediately gains one of Volkswagen's better interiors of recent times. Our test car had the huge 15-inch upgraded MIB4 infotainment screen, which also brings in a head-up display for a cost of £1,130 all-in, and while it's still not perfect - much of the car's features are operated entirely through the touchscreen, including almost every aspect of the climate control save for adjusting the temperature (at least now doable with backlit sliders beneath the screen) - it is far less teeth-gnashingly frustrating to get on with the human-machine interface in the new Tiguan's interior than it has been in some of the company's slightly older cabins.
There's also a smattering of proper switchgear, including physical buttons on the steering wheel (and not those awful haptic pads, hooray!), a general feeling of solidity and quality to all of the materials used, and the light-up patterns on the trim fillets that give the Tiguan's passenger compartment a suitably classy ambience at night. You get horizontal lines in the Elegance models and dots in the R-Line, and either of these can change colour according to drive modes and/or settings on the touchscreen. The SUV also gains a solitary example of the excellent 'Smart Dials' from a current-generation
Skoda Superb, the item in question sitting where you'd ordinarily find the gearlever (itself relocated to be a column-shift in the Tiguan). This rotary controller has its own digital mini-screen, and you can press it to cycle between either the VW's drive modes or the volume of its infotainment, subsequently using the outer collar to twirl the settings how you see fit.
Practicality
There's an old PHEV drawback which rears its ugly head here, and that's reduced boot space. The bigger 19.7kWh battery pack in the Tiguan eHybrid takes up room under the cargo area, so while there's still a stowage cubby for cables under the floor, you lose 162 litres of capacity when compared to a Tiguan that isn't a plug-in hybrid (490 litres here, 652 litres in the other models). At least there's plenty of leg- and headroom in row two of the VW SUV, with the rear 40:20:40 split-folding bench able to slide forwards and backwards to configure the interior according to whether you require more passenger space or more cargo-carrying capability, while there are useful and large storage solutions for various items dotted about the interior of the Tiguan.
Performance
We had this Tiguan R-Line on test a week after trying a ninth-gen
Volkswagen Passat fitted with the lower-output (204hp/350Nm) variant of the same 1.5-based TSI PHEV drivetrain. Frankly, though, even with its additional 68hp and 50Nm, and despite an on-paper 0-62mph time of 7.2 seconds looking healthy compared to the Passat's 8.1-second sprint, we can honestly say the Tiguan 272 eHybrid felt no livelier than its wagon-shaped stablemate.
And before you say it, that's not down to a huge weight penalty the SUV is carrying. In fact, the Tiguan 272 is only 30kg heavier than the Passat 204, so we were kind of hoping it'd feel a fair bit quicker in reality; a shame that it didn't, then. That said, this is still a largely cultured drivetrain, despite occasional raucousness from the 1.5-litre TSI turbo petrol at higher revs and the deployment of an older, six-speed DSG transmission in the eHybrid PHEVs (other auto Tiguans gain seven-speed DSGs), and it has more than enough about it to make the Volkswagen SUV acceptably brisk for everyday use, if in no way thrilling for the way it accelerates - even if it has getting on for 300 horsepower.
Economy-wise, it's the same story for the Tiguan 272 as the Passat the week before, or indeed for almost any PHEV you care to mention. If you don't plug these things in, don't expect three-figure economy figures from them. We managed to elicit a 94.2mpg figure for the first few miles we were pottering around locally in the Tiguan, which is pleasing, but once we'd done one middle-distance trip up the A1 to Leeds, the battery power went and the car ultimately finished up on 41mpg after 315 miles at a 33mph average. Now that's because we didn't plug the Volkswagen in again after it depleted its battery, and that's on us because these new eHybrid PHEVs from the German manufacturer have an excellent 50kW DC recharging ability that means they'll go from 5-80 per cent in just 26 minutes if you need them to. But it's also representative of the sort of fuel consumption most people will get from the Tiguan 272 if they're regular motorway drivers - even with the bigger battery pack and clever onboard electrical management modes, you still end up losing the main EV assistance sooner rather than later if you drive 100 miles or more at a time, and then you'll also be finding you're in the 40-60mpg ballpark more often than not, rather than the sunlit uplands of 672mpg as stated by WLTP.
Ride & Handling
These MQB evo cars handle cleanly but not particularly thrillingly, and the Tiguan eHybrid 272 doesn't buck that trend in the slightest. While the steering is accurate and nicely weighted, and the body control is admirable without being otherworldly, the most you can do with the Volkswagen SUV is hustle it along at about seven-tenths, whereupon it'll put on a sweetly assured but hugely uninvolving handling display. Start pushing the Tiguan much further towards the edge of its kinematic envelope, though, and neither it nor you as the driver are going to be happy. It's much more content being guided along just within itself, which reflects on its primary purpose as a family-friendly SUV, rather than any sort of high-riding pseudo-hot-hatch.
The thing is, on 20-inch alloy wheels and without the adaptive DCC Pro suspension set-up, the Tiguan eHybrid 272 could really have done with riding with just a little more grace than it did. Not that it was uncomfortable, per se, but it was always a tad too stiff-legged and firm-edged - particularly on poorer road surfaces when travelling in the mid-speed range - to be truly called 'opulent', although suppression of both wind and tyre noise was first rate. In short, we came to the conclusion that the Tiguan would be better off in a lowlier spec with no sporty pretensions whatsoever, because the R-Line trim took the gloss off its outright ride comfort without ever providing anything in the way of dynamic fizz to compensate for that fact.
Value
In the wake of The 50-Grand Passat, our social media was once again ablaze with incandescent rage about the idea of a tricked-up Tiguan costing the thick end of £60,000. And as we said with the VW estate in our review of that car, we know there are lots of arguments about PCP and inflation and people's wages not increasing that make some sense of otherwise-unfathomable modern car prices.
The problem is, in that totally subjective way that folk tend to use this phrase, the Tiguan eHybrid R-Line - while perfectly nice enough and polished to an overall high standard - never felt anything like a 'sixty-grand car'. It's workmanlike and strait-laced, while not possessed of enough visual clout, sophisticated interior finishing nor dynamic pizzazz to give the sort of sensation that it might be enough to tempt people out of their comparable Audi, BMW or Volvo SUVs; instead, it just feels overpriced when held up against a good Ford, Kia or Hyundai alternative.
At least standard equipment levels on the Tiguan R-Line are generous enough, although as evinced by our test car that had its price boosted by £10,045 of extras, there is a lengthy and expensive options list available to the VW buyer that might make either the list price or monthly figures on PCP that little bit less palatable still. This includes the fact that, while much of the optional kit fitted to the eHybrid in this instance consisted of non-essential luxuries (as you'd expect for this significant outlay) that you can easily do without, some of the additions absolutely ought to be standard-fit - for example, £1,140 for the Comfort Package (keyless entry, a powered tailgate with kick-to-open feature, and a memory function for Park Assist Plus) and £205 for a tyre-pressure monitoring system seem like bleedin' liberties on a car which costs more than £48,000 to start with.
Verdict
We've tried the third-generation Volkswagen Tiguan in a number of formats now and not yet managed to quite gel with it in any of them. Maybe it's the underwhelming exterior styling or the very safe, stolid way it drives which robs this midsized SUV of some of its former gloss, but identifying the ideal spec of this VW is proving hard to do. Neil wasn't enamoured of the 204hp PHEV overseas, James was hardly raving about the 150hp eTSI here in the UK, and now yours truly has handed back this high-end, 272hp R-Line and failed to be thoroughly convinced by it. Maybe the solution is to fit the Tiguan with the wackiest engine option in its present line-up, namely the 265hp 2.0-litre TSI engine from either a Golf GTI Mk8.5 or the current
Skoda Octavia vRS... but that's hardly going to make sense from a running-costs perspective. As it is, from what we've experienced with it so far, the Mk3 Tiguan is undoubtedly still going to sell well, yet it's unlikely to make anyone fall in love with it - and we can think of quite a few better-value competitors that we'd rather have instead, more to the point.
