Volkswagen Tiguan PHEV unlikely to take on new RAV4 PHEV

In the same week that Volkswagen Australia held the launch for its third-generation Tiguan, Toyota hosted the global unveiling for its hugely anticipated sixth-gen RAV4 – and in doing so exposed a wide ideological chasm between the world’s top two car-makers.

On the Toyota side, an all-hybrid strategy will see a plug-in RAV4 variant offered in Australia for the first time.

For Volkswagen, an Aussie range that deliberately avoids the Tiguan’s plug-in hybrid (PHEV) option that’s available overseas instead handballs eco-minded customers in the direction of the brand’s ID.4 and ID.5 EVs.

Asked whether the Tiguan eHybrid would join the local range later, Volkswagen Australia’s director of passenger cars, Piergiorgio Minto, said a solid business case had yet to stack up for the petrol-electric Tiguan, which pairs a 1.5-litre turbo petrol with an 85kW electric motor for nearly 100km of EV-only range and up to 202kW of net power.

“We’re working on that,” Minto said.

“We are full throttle, working together with Germany to assess and to see whether it makes sense, whether it has a business case that will work.”

But while the Federal Government’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard gets set to start applying penalties to car-makers who fall on the wrong side of its emissions targets, VW’s local office isn’t concerned about not having an electrified option in what will likely be its top-selling model range for the foreseeable future.

“From a product line-up perspective, the ID.4 and ID. 5 really take care of that [NVES] aspect for us,” explained VW’s head of passenger car product, Arjun Nidigallu.

“If you want a really efficient and alternative fuel powertrain in a medium SUV, we’ve got that as an option. But at the same time we are working in the background to make sure that the [Tiguan] PHEV has a good business case, and when it does we’ll talk about it more.”

But while Volkswagen Australia is happy to let lower-volume dedicated EVs do the heavy lifting when it comes to emissions reduction, Toyota, with just a single fully electric model in its showroom, will instead lean even further into its hybrid-only strategy for RAV4 by committing to a PHEV for the first time.

To be available in both 201kW front-wheel-drive and 227kW all-wheel-drive guises, the RAV4 PHEV will, Toyota says, be able to drive up to 100km on a single charge of its 22.7kWh lithium-ion battery. Pricing for Toyota Australia’s first PHEV, however, has yet to be announced.

And it’s pricing that is likely getting in the way of Volkswagen bringing a hybrid medium SUV of its own here. The freshly launched range opens at $44,990 plus on-road costs (ORCs) for the 110kW FWD base model and tops out at $70,490 plus ORCs for a high-spec 195kW AWD range-topper.

It’s an open question as to where a similarly specified PHEV variant would sit, but PHEV premiums can be considerable – Mazda, for example, charges an extra $13K if you select the 2.5-litre plug-in hybrid powertrain for its CX-60 instead of its 3.3-litre turbo-petrol inline six.

It’s worth noting that VW Australia isn’t necessarily opposed to the idea of a plug-in hybrid. The company already offers an eHybrid PHEV powertrain in its Touareg R large SUV, but amortising the additional cost of an expensive engine/motor/battery combo is more easily done when a car’s price tag has six digits rather than just five. That said, the $133,490 plus ORCs Touareg R still sports a massive $20K price gap between it and the next-cheapest model in the range, the Touareg 210TDI R-Line.

The market share of hybrids has grown in the SUV segment, up 35 per cent year to date versus the same period in 2024, with PHEVs undergoing an even more significant 116 per cent spike in sales.

However, while petrol-only powertrains are steadily becoming less popular, sales of combustion-only SUVs still outnumber those of hybrids by about three to one. Volkswagen, it appears, is merely following the market rather than trying to dictate a new direction for it.

“The sharp lift in sales that [PHEV vehicles] have seen is coming from a very low base, and I think that’s a really important point, because the same thing happened with electric vehicles,” said VW Australia’s PR manager, Daniel De Gasperi.

“Getting back to what the Tiguan is all about, and what our customers have told us – and we’ve done the research – is that performance and dynamics are really high for those Tiguan customers, and there’s not currently a PHEV at that level.”

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