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It’ll figure in the Oz lineup too. The engine is a renewed one, meeting Euro 6 emissions rules through AdBlue exhaust fluid injection - you need to add 12 litres of the stuff every 10,000 km or so. We tried the same engine in the Audi A8 and A7. It’s smooth and quiet when you’re using it gently, but in the Touareg it voices a sharp rattle as you dig deeper into the performance. But performance is certainly there for the taking. The torque figure of 600Nm results in really useful acceleration, even well beyond 100km/h. It’s hard to see that it’ll be too badly crippled by a trailer. But travelling unladen, the autobox is annoying, being inclined to shift too often. So if you just want to gain say 5km/h to do a clean merging lane change on a freeway, it’ll often change down even if you’ve just tickled thee pedal. That’ll likely give more acceleration than you want, making small speed changes difficult to dish out.
Steel coil springs are used in the base suspension. On this undercarriage the Touareg doesn’t feel too luxurious. The ride has sharp, percussive edges, even at town speed, and on rural roads there’s too much side-to-side rocking if one wheel goes over a bump and the opposite one doesn’t. This is a result of stiff anti-roll bars, set up that way to check cornering roll. Sure enough in smooth bends it does track tenaciously and roll little. The Germans call this sporty, and indeed the steering is precise if low-geared, but it’s also short on feedback. Add some bumps to the bend and again you’re being jostled around. Overall then, not much fun or sportiness. But it is stable and trustworthy. Brakes are reassuringly firm and strong too. However, the Touareg can be specified with various trick suspension systems that might ease its troubles. First is air suspension, which should be able to soften the ride unladen, while still coping with the duress of cargo or trailering. It’ll also jack the car up for better off-road clearance. Adaptive anti-roll is also available, a system that does a great job on the Bentley Bentayga.
This decouples the anti-roll bars when the car’s running straight, which should remove that side-to-side rocking. They’re also decoupled for off-roading, to give better wheel articulation. But they firm up in bends to keep the car from leaning over. Finally there’s a four-wheel steering option. Like nearly all such systems, it steers the rear tyres in the opposite sense to the fronts at low speed, helping manoeuvrability. Going faster they instead go crabwise, the same as the fronts (but to a lesser degree), making things more stable. Back to the spec I drove. The 255/45 20 tyres kick up a fair bit of noise on coarse surfaces, undermining what’s otherwise a pretty quiet cruise. All-in, the Touareg certainly doesn’t have the hush of the related Audi Q7. Off-road, the Touareg offers as standard a 500mm wade depth, rising to 580mm with air suspension, which has an 80mm (extra) off-road height setting. An optional off-road pack adds underbody protection plates, tow eyes, not to mention a 90-litre fuel tank.
