Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI 2020 Review - International

If you’re one of those people kicking yourself for not snapping up one of Audi’s short-lived, accidental V12 TDI Q7s, then worry no more. Volkswagen has just made its accidental replacement.

Welcome to the world of the Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI, which delivers stupendous sophistication, plus 900Nm of torque, 310kW of power and enough urge to hurl 2305kg of five-seat luxury SUV to 100km/h in 4.9 seconds.

I mean, the best of the new Volkswagen Touareg V6 turbo-diesel models tops out at 210kW and 600Nm... It’s also an €89,825 machine in Germany, which translates to around $145,000-$150,000 here, if Volkswagen Oz can shake a few of them from the tree.

But blink and you’ll miss it; especially because it might not arrive in Australia until 2021, which is likely to be its last year in production.

That’s because, just like the Audi Q7 V12 TDI, the Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI’s existence is a happy, fleeting accident expected to survive in showrooms for between one and two years.

Back in 2008 Audi showed the R8 V12 TDI Le Mans concept car to leverage the diesel happy-happy-joy-joy that came from winning Le Mans. The car never made production.

Still, Audi had a new engine ready for it, with suppliers all booked up with guaranteed volume contracts but nowhere to put that V12. The Q7 V12 TDI happened because it had the only Audi engine bay tall enough to swallow the engine.

Fast-forward a decade and the same thing has happened again, but this time to Volkswagen.

Bentley’s Bentayga was supposed to score this V8 TDI, but the Bentley buyers rejected the idea of it. The Volkswagen Group was left with an expensively developed engine, engineered to Bentley levels of sophistication and refinement in mind, suppliers all signed up and nowhere to put it.

The Touareg was an easy, but not obvious choice. It was easy because it is essentially the same as the Bentayga beneath the skin, plus it couldn’t go in Audi’s Q7 because they already had their own stunning, high-tech V8 diesel in the SQ7 and Porsche has gone all diesel-shy.

It wasn’t obvious because the Volkswagen badge can’t ask the same price that a Bentley badge can.

Effectively, then, the Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI is a Bentley hiding inside a VW body and interior.

The engine is so strong and the torque so instantly ready that nobody even thought to electrify it in any way. It would only need it for a tiny reduction in emissions.

So, unlike Audi’s electric compressor system, the only reason the Touareg V8 has a 48-volt electrical system is to run its active anti-roll bar, which performs magic things with its body roll and allows it to be more softly sprung than it might have been.

It’s loaded with the full suite of tech the chassis and interior can swallow, including the active anti-roll bars, four-wheel steering, air suspension all around, matrix LED headlights and Volkswagen’s curved Innovision multimedia touch-screen.

It’s the kind of machine where you look around and can’t figure out what else they could reasonably have shoved into it. But the most important thing they shoved into it sits up front.

It’s easy to confuse this Volkswagen Group V8 turbo-diesel with the other one that sits inside the SQ7’s engine bay.

After all, they share their 4.0-litre capacities, hot-vee turbochargers and high levels of torque and sophistication.

This one, dubbed EA898, is at once higher tech and lower tech. The Audi one uses two conventional turbochargers and an electric compressor. This one just uses two turbos in series, one after the other.

It has so much torque, so low in its rev range, that it doesn’t feel like it needs anything more, with peak torque of 900Nm arriving at just 1000rpm then hanging on until 3250.

Back when Audi did the SQ7 motor, it couldn’t get that much torque that early out of the V8, which is why they needed the electric compressor.

But Volkswagen has managed it here with some exceeding mechanical-engineering trickery, including switching the four-valve cylinder-heads to three valves at low revs. It slides the camshaft to close one of the exhaust valves, so all of the exhaust gases are directed at just one propeller wheel until 2200rpm.

That helps the variable-geometry turbocharger to spin up and start providing energy much faster than before. And then the other exhaust valve and the other turbocharger join in to take it out to 5000 revs, with the power peaking at 3500rpm.

It’s a joyous thing to use, and it’s surprisingly so. It’s unfussed and sounds astonishingly little like a diesel. At low revs, even at idle, it sounds so quiet and vibrates so little that you could easily mistake it for a large petrol-powered motor.

It’s the same when it spins up, sounding very little different to a modern spark-ignition turbocharged V8.

It’s almost sweet, almost menacing and almost brutal, but it’s somehow so sophisticated that it stops short of all three and instead walks a fine line of sumptuous effortlessness.

Volkswagen blames the severe throttle pickup lag on its V6 TDI on having to comply with the new WLTP emissions regulations, but there’s no such problem on the V8. Either the three-valve configuration or the sheer capacity help, but the pickup is as instantaneous as a petrol motor.

And it hammers. In its Sport mode it even sings, with a lovely deep richness easing into the cabin. It’s glorious.
It is also responsive, with the two turbos spooling up quickly and sharply.

If you want it to be violent from idle, it can be. If you want to ease away strongly from any situation, at any speed, it can. If you want to effortlessly cruise across a country or blast over a mountain pass, it can do both with surprising aplomb.

It’s matched with an eight-speed automatic transmission, which is given the thankless task of distribution and multiplying this much torque, and the all-wheel drive is fully variable from one end to the other.

It never – never – feels like it’s overwhelmed by the performance, largely because of...

A 48-volt electric anti-roll bar is just one of the tricks of the Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI. It uses just about everything in the Volkswagen Group’s MLB Evo kitbag.

There’s all-wheel steering. There’s electro-mechanical steering that changes depending on the mode. There’s air suspension all-round that lifts for off-road work and drops at high speed or in its sports modes.

There are specific 20-inch alloys (for the Millionth Touareg special-edition – the normal V8 TDI uses 19s) wrapped in high-tech 245/45 R20 Michelins. Active cruise control, lane-departure warning, automatic parking and anything else you could imagine a Bentley should have.

It works. In every mode. Every time. In any circumstance.

We belted it down high-speed motorways at 250km/h, over twisting, narrow mountain passes, cross-country on farm tracks and off-road where no tracks showed through the wet grass. And, of course, city work.

The ride quality is terrific, with absolute body control and similarly absolute confidence spread through the cabin.

The rear-wheel steering is a godsend in tight areas, especially in cities, and it even helps with high-speed lane changes.

But the steering is the surprise highlight, allowing the car to switch easily between the relaxed accuracy needed for cross-continent work and the pinpoint accuracy needed for mountain passes.

The feedback, weighting and feel all put BMW’s latest efforts to shame and it’s deft for a 2305kg machine.

Unusually, a big portion of our drive in the Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI took place at night, which let the matrix LED system shine. Each headlight has 22 individual lights, which can be specifically switched off one-by-one.

The lighting itself is superb, shining a clean, clear white light deep into the night, but the matrix part is brilliant. It means you can leave it on automatic high beam all the time, with the car’s brain blanking out light areas around oncoming traffic, or cars you’re approaching from behind.

It works superbly, with not a single car flashing its lights at us in anger, leaving us free to properly see apexes and approaching corners.

It gets better, though, with the thermal-imaging camera identifying hikers, wearing black, on the main road in the dark. The car then flashed its high-beam lights at them to make sure we’d seen them. They may have been perturbed to be flashed, but not as much as they’d been if the driver of a 2.3-tonne machine hadn’t seen them...

The interior is a wonderful place to be, with the best of everything Volkswagen ever conceived for the Touareg.
The seats are sumptuous but supportive, the dash layout is the same as other Touaregs, including its digital dash display and its huge Innovision curved multimedia screen.

The interior is huge and every seat is comfortable, even with the front seats in full-length mode and there’s even, like, a million litres of luggage space (OK, 810 litres, but it feels like enough for just about every situation).

In a heartbeat. Sure, the Volkswagen badge struggles to cut it at the price point, but this is destined to be a cult car. Just like the Audi Q7 V12 TDI was.

The Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI will be bought and never sold by plenty of people and once it’s gone (unless there’s some huge boost in sales that force an expensive upgrade), it won’t come back.

The only downside is the same one as the rest of the Touareg range. As impressive as the displays of the Innovision screen are, it takes far too long to execute some simple commands with no rotary controller or haptic feedback.

It’s better with familiarity, but it still takes the driver’s eyes off the road for far too long and the voice recognition isn’t sophisticated enough to take over.

Other than that, what’s not to like about a practical SUV that’s useful off-road, Bentley comfortable on-road, effortlessly powerful, incredibly sophisticated and the best of its kind there’s ever likely to be?

How much does the 2020 Volkswagen Touareg V8 TDI cost?
Price: $145,000 (estimated)
Available: 2020 (with any luck)
Engine: 4.0-litre V8 twin-turbo diesel
Output: 310kW/900Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Fuel: 7.4L/100km (WLTP)
CO2: 195g/km (WLTP)