Volkswagen Tiguan 103TDI 2011 v 2017 162TSI Highline 2017 comparison

It’s more than six years since I bought my Volkswagen Tiguan 103 TDI. Now, 66,600km down the track, am I as chuffed about the car as I was when I collected it, shiny and new - with about 25km on the clock - in July 2011?

Putting aside all the brouhaha with diesel Volkswagens (and Porsches, and Audis, and Skodas) in the intervening years, all I can say is, well, maybe I’m not quite as chuffed. But I’m eminently pleased.

With no frightening service costs looming (although the timing belt will be coming up for replacement soon) I can’t – touch wood – say I’ve found anything about the Tiguan which has unpleasantly surprised or failed to please me.

Sure, I knew from the get-go luggage space might be an issue (it actually hasn’t, but more of that later) and I might be facing high-dollar servicing costs but, in reality, neither of the above have materialised. In fact, given the Tiguan’s surprisingly hefty 2500kg towing capability, I installed a Hayman-Reese towbar and purchased a small Jayco camper-trailer (sadly, the long distance touring I hoped for hasn’t as yet materialised).

Tyres? Well, though some apparently do a lot better, I seem to be in the middle of the road and my 4MOTION Tiguan required four new tyres at around 40,000km.

The car has proved pretty much perfect for the rural use to which it is regularly put; including hauling firewood-laden trailers through bogged-up access areas, threading narrow bush tracks and cruising the freeways where the average fuel consumption of 7.5L/100km recorded over time – not as good as when I first bought the Tiguan and well shy of the claimed 6.2L/100km – has been appreciated, especially with inflated diesel prices. I have yet to check whether this has changed significantly following the “fix” concocted by Volkswagen following the dieselgate crisis.

And I have never had any reason to question the reliability of the heavy-duty wet-clutch DSG transmission (a regular six-speed auto was used in Tiguans until late 2010) which continues to operate without a hiccup. With the understanding a DSG gearbox is never going to be quite as smooth as a conventional auto in some situations, the shifting has always been consistent, without any of the foibles some have experienced with the dry-clutch DSGs.

The Tiguan is used, not pampered, and apart from the rear cup holder giving up the ghost early in the piece, there’s nothing a good detail job couldn’t do to restore it to near-new.

In fact, the only glimmer of a scowl from me relates to the small rattles and buzzes, mainly from the door trims and somewhere in the dashboard, which annoyingly come and go intermittently. Otherwise, the Tiguan still feels taut and solid.

At purchase time, I probably thought my Tiguan ownership would last about three years.

But here I am, with more than twice that time having passed, still a happy customer with no apparent reason other than finances to consider moving on.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t thought about it, particularly when Volkswagen launched its second-generation Tiguan last year. Almost inevitably I succumbed to an irresistible urge to at least figure what could be gained from taking an onward step.
With this in mind, I’ve just recently spent a bit of time in a current-generation Tiguan, to at least quantify the differences between the old and the new.

Of the two second-gen Tiguans I’ve driven recently, the one I’ve spent more time with is a top-spec 162TSI. Optioned with metallic paint and the $2000 Driver Assistance Package, it brings a host of safety technologies – many of which I reckon should standard, considering its price point which already hovers, without the package, just below $50,000 before ORCs.

It wasn’t quite the car to line up alongside my base-spec 103TDI – that would be the current 110TDI which is stickered at $42,940, or $3800 more than my car in 2011 – but it was at least an introduction to the best Volkswagen has to offer in terms of Tiguans sold in Australia.

I guess the biggest difference between then and now is the safety and interconnectivity technology. Line my Tiguan up against today’s 110TDI and you’ll notice I’m not ticking many boxes: No autonomous emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-departure or blind-spot warning, no rear cross-traffic alert, or front and side cameras to aid with parking. In my case, there’s even no Bluetooth, or rear-view camera and, at this level, sat-nav also got a miss.

If you totalled up the gear which is now standard in the Tiguan 110TDI, you’d find it goes a long way towards bridging the price gap – not to mention the growth in size, the bigger wheels and tyres and the benefits of the more sophisticated Volkswagen group MQB platform underpinning today’s car.

The second-generation Tiguan cabin, though in reality hardly any bigger, somehow feels more light and airy, and the added features make you feel you really have jumped that decade to a new, more connected world.

How much bigger overall is the new Tiguan?
Well, not as much as its more looming presence suggests. The wheelbase has gone up by 76mm, the width by 30mm, and the overall length by 59mm, while height has actually dropped, albeit by a minuscule 7mm. In fact all the important dimensions reveal today’s

Tiguan is still overshadowed by the likes of Mazda’s CX-5, over which it claims a substantial increase in load capacity. Some might think this sounds a bit ingenuous given the measurements obtained during a recent comparison test where it was discovered there are actually few DDDs (discernible dimensional differences) among the mid-size SUV protagonists.

Doing a real-world luggage area check on old and new Tiguans, I found the differences were there, particularly in width and depth, but some – load height and tailgate opening width for example – slightly favoured the original. And, although the new Tiguan retains those annoying straps which must be pulled to lower the rear seat back (what’s wrong with a lever on the seat back?), it loses the neat double-folding action lowering the cushion at the same time as the backrest is dropped to maximise load height. The latter feature helps when loading things such as pushbikes, which I do quite a lot.

It’s hard to see the current Tiguan’s claimed advantages over the Mazda CX-5. The actual, useful dimensions show no real differences unless the sliding rear seat is moved forward to achieve that 615 litres of boot space – but doing so reduces legroom in the back to almost nil if average-size folk are travelling up front.

For all this, I’m not going to dispute the second-generation Tiguan’s handy lead over the 2007 original. And it contrives to look bigger, even though it’s not a lot, which will undoubtedly appeal to those prone to feeling intimidated on the road.

As for the drive experience, I join other road testers in thinking the new Tiguan feels a little less wieldy than the more compact original in, for example, tight parking situations: It is, however, only by a matter of degrees. And, importantly, the kerb weight has hardly gone up.

Like the original, Volkswagen’s latest Tiguan steers very well, and the fact it’s kerb weight has hardly moved means the 110kW diesel (which has been driven previously) continues with the same basic characteristics: Like my 103kW/320Nm TDI, it feels a little tardy on part-throttle acceleration, but the 340Nm of torque muscles in quickly if the driver asks for a bit more.

Personally, I like the fact the new model is somehow more serene inside. Even though there’s no measurable increase in cabin width it feels more airy, less wrapped around the driver than the first generation Tiguan. Some would like this, and others wouldn’t.

But the second-gen Tiguan is, at the same time, a well-planted, quiet and comfy European-bred SUV cruiser with a lot of technology probably only being dreamed of in 2007. Right there is a major reason why this Tiguan owner would consider doing the swap.