Volkswagen Taigun: Perfect for Indian roads

Adaptability is the biggest challenge for any car on sale in a market such as India. A car in India doesn’t just have to appeal to customers, it also has to put up with the driving conditions that India has to offer. Traffic-stricken cities, bad roads or in some cases, no roads at all. Of course, one cannot assess the breadth of a car’s adaptability after driving it for merely a few hours. Except we haven’t driven the Volkswagen Taigun for just a few hours – we have lived with it for several months and have run multiple examples of this Volkswagen in our long-term test fleet. Apart from that, we have also used the SUV on record setting drives. Spending all this time with a car not only gives you intimate knowledge of how it performs, but also tells you how well equipped it is to deal with our driving conditions. And all our time spent driving the Taigun tells us that it has been developed keeping India and Indian conditions in mind.

I must begin by talking about the styling of the Taigun, because it has grown on me quite a bit since it was first launched in 2021. This SUV does look quintessentially like a Volkswagen – no unnecessary lines, just enough chrome to appeal to Indian audiences, and there are no polarising styling elements as on some of the other SUVs in this segment. And like most Volkswagens, it is timeless. You do get sportier-looking variants in the line-up but even in its standard form, the Volkswagen Taigun does look quite endearing, especially in this Curcuma Yellow shade. I love its compact dimensions too, which make it very easy to thread this SUV through traffic in both Mumbai and Pune, not to mention how easy it is to park, a massive advantage given the parking space crunch in most Indian cities. The Taigun also has impressive road presence – something you might not immediately associate with rivals in its segment.

It is actually refreshing to drive a Taigun in the city; unlike other cars in which you might find yourself trying to carve your way through traffic and end up with your nerves frazzled, when you’re driving a Taigun, other road users tend to give you a wider berth. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the Taigun looks very similar to the (previous-gen) Volkswagen Tiguan – a larger, more expensive SUV – and a flash of the LED headlamps means that the rest of the traffic lets you motor about in peace, an underrated joy that you can only appreciate after having spent a considerable amount of time with the SUV. Even when you are following the SUV from the rear, the connected tail lamps do give it the aura of a much more expensive car, making this Volkswagen look very cool, especially in the dark.

All that time in traffic also makes you more appreciative of the comfort inside the cabin of the Taigun. The steering adjusts for rake as well as reach and when you couple that with the height adjustable driver’s seat, finding a good driving position is easy. The seats themselves are comfortable and the infotainment screen sitting in your line of sight makes it very easy to access most of the functions. It also gets wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity, a must-have in a new car in my opinion. You also get a sunroof, which, coupled with the ambient lighting, brings more light into the cabin and makes it a more cheerful place to be in. It’s not like rear-seat passengers get the short end of the stick either, and there’s plenty of room on offer for them. And thanks to automatic climate control, the Taigun’s cabin can be cooled down or heated up in a jiffy – very useful for when you are ferrying back tired crew members after a long day of shooting.

The performance of the Taigun is another reason why its keys are in high demand in the evo India fleet, and while we’ve run the 1.5 TSI Evo-engined Taigun earlier in the fleet, what we have here is the 1-litre TSI with the manual gearbox. The performance on offer is punchy and the manual does offer an engaging driving experience. If you’re partial to driving convenience though, you can also have this engine mated to the excellent 6-speed torque converter automatic. With two engine and gearbox options on offer, the Taigun definitely offers buyers the freedom of choice, and these enthusiastic powertrains are complemented by the excellent ride and handling balance of the SUV.

The low-speed ride of the SUV is firm but it is never uncomfortable, even over the pothole-riddled roads we encounter every monsoon. In fact, the Taigun didn’t even make a fuss when we took it to the Rann of Kutch or the border roads in Gujarat and Rajasthan during our Border Patrol record run, taking it all in its stride with no complaints whatsoever. The firm ride only gets better with higher speeds and on open highways, the Taigun feels nothing but rock solid. Even at its top speed at the NATRAX during another record-setting drive, the Volkswagen Taigun gave drivers the confidence to push behind the ’wheel, reducing their fatigue considerably. And this is only bolstered by the fact that the SUV gets a 5-star crash safety rating not just in the Bharat NCAP crash tests but also the Global NCAP crash tests, demonstrating the excellent safety that is offered with each Volkswagen.

Crucially, the excellent dynamics and the level of safety on the Volkswagen Taigun is down to the MQB-A0-IN platform on which the SUV is based. This platform was developed with India in mind and it was localised but not cheapened. And that meant that this made-for-India Volkswagen continued to get the German-engineered DNA which gives it surefooted stability and handling chops along with excellent crash safety. 

As I mentioned earlier, these facets about the Volkswagen Taigun are not something we discovered over the course of a first drive but they have become apparent after spending time extensively with this Volkswagen. And each time we have driven the SUV, we could not help but be impressed by how perfectly suited it is to our driving conditions. This Volkswagen definitely gets a lot of things right, and there is no better indicator of that than the sheer number of Taiguns that have now found happy homes in India. While that is no mean feat, considering how difficult our market is to crack, it was made possible because the Volkswagen Taigun and its breadth of abilities was developed with India in mind.