you might expect, Volkswagen
has hiked the price here. That
said, starting at £23,155 it’s still
a bargain. In fact the Taigo could
make itself at home and become
the automotive equivalent of a
parakeet. VW may also discover
it’s inadvertently competing
with itself.
Before we get to that, a word
about why the Taigo is here. The
official line is that VW wanted
to expand its range of crossovers
and SUVs. Specifically it wanted
to fill a gap between the existing
T-Cross and the T-Roc. This
sounds odd. For a start the
company already offers more
vehicles in this category than
any other manufacturer. As well
as the T-Roc and T-Cross there’s
the Tiguan, Tiguan Allspace,
Touareg, plus the ID.4 and ID.5
in its electric range. Second, the
gap it’s talking about is so small
you’d need a micrometer to
measure it. According to the
marketing blurb, the Taigo is a
vital new addition because it “is150mm longer than the T-Cross
and 37mm shorter than the
T-Roc”. Really? Imagine taking
the T-Roc for a test drive, getting
out at the end and saying,
“Damn and blast, I thought this
was the car for me, but I now
realise it’s 37mm too long.” In
any case, if the Taigo is halfway
between the two, shouldn’t it be
called the T-Croc?
An alternative reason, which
Volkswagen may not want to
admit, is that it has been
disproportionately squeezed by
silicon chip shortages. All car
manufacturers are affected but
especially those using lots of
high-tech components. Land
Rover’s production lines have
stalled, Toyota has reduced
output and the Volkswagen
Group temporarily closed the
factory that builds the Touareg,
as well as related models sold by
Audi and Porsche. These cars
each contain as many as 3,000
microchips. The beauty of the
Taigo is that it contains farfewer. It seems that South
American customers like the
reassurance of old-style manual
and analogue controls. This
means the Pamplona factory in
Spain, where the Taigo is
assembled for Europe, can use
components that until recently
looked as though they’d been
superseded, such as sliders and
physical knobs and switches.
This turns out to be the
Taigo’s biggest strength. It has a
mechanical handbrake and —
on the auto version — a full-size
gear shifter, plus proper buttons
you can operate by touch alone
and which make a reassuring
click. Remember those? No
need for haptics when you’ve
got good old mechanical. For
many the arrival of the
electronic handbrake —
prompted by weight-saving and
alleged convenience — was a
backwards step. So was the Tic
Tac-box-sized gearshifter that
the latest VWs share with
Porsche. The Taigo’s old-styleDRIVING●Nick Rufford
Introducing the Golf ’s new arch
rival — another Volkswagen
REVIEW:
VOLKSWAGEN
TAIGO
O
ccasionally a VW from
overseas makes its
way to these shores
like a migratory bird
blown off course. The
VW Fox — a cheap
and cheerful urban
runabout — was
imported here in the
Noughties from
South America. Now
another no-frills visitor has
arrived: the VW Nivus, a
five-door crossover that sells in
its native Brazil for less than
£20,000. It has been renamed
the Taigo (pronounced “tie-go”)
for the European market and, as50 • The Sunday Times Magazine