2025 Volkswagen Tiguan review

Is the 2025 VW Tiguan crucial?

Just a little. The Tiguan is Volkswagen’s global best-seller nowadays, so its jump into a third generation – when the previous two have sold more than seven million units – is far from inconsequential.

Not least when VW has looked a little on the ropes of late, facing the backlash of its recent ergonomic missteps. This car is an important step on the road to recovery.

Which might explain why VW has played the Tiggy’s new look with the straightest of bats. Where the outgoing car has chiselled lines and some neat tension to its design, its replacement looks, well, bland.

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At least to our eyes. Perhaps familiarity, or seeing it alongside more wackadoodle rivals, will reveal such subtle styling to be a masterstroke. We’ll keep our minds open.

VW has played things safely for European buyers, too. Naturally, this third-gen car gets more electrification than ever, most notably a pair of plug-in hybrid models dubbed eHybrid, but pure petrol and even diesel remain on the menu.

Aussie buyers, meanwhile, are initially limited to just petrol cars.

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Should we be ticked off?

Not truly. Good as the eHybrids are, covering around 100km purely on electric and 900km overall, a stock 1.5-litre TSI car is getting on for 300kg lighter, bringing all manner of benefits.

Australia’s range is yet to be defined, but European buyers get a choice of 96kW and 110kW outputs, both driving the front wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. Mild hybrid technology smooths out the idle-stop procedure and quells the engine during deceleration.

The 2.0-litre TSI lives on too, with 150kW and 195kW tunes, the latter just like you’ll find in the front of a Golf GTI and good for a perky 5.9sec sprint to 100km/h.

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Both 2.0-litre versions channel their outputs through a dual-clutch auto and all-wheel-drive combination to yield the Tiguan’s headline 2300kg towing capacity.

No manuals remain anywhere in the range, in fact, with the design team decluttering the centre console as a result – gear selection is now via the right-hand column stalk a la Mercedes-Benz, with the wipers and indicators incorporated on the left.

The resulting room allows for copious smartphone storage and wireless charging as well as a natty new drive mode dial that lifts the ambience more than you might anticipate.

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How does it drive?

Well, MQB-platform cars have always possessed pretty sharp reactions, and it would appear VW’s new MQB Evo base is similarly alert.

The Tiggy is an ever-faithful partner, its front flicking nicely into corners and the rear axle following tidily. Grip is unfailingly strong and handling utterly consistent. Body roll is impressively minimal for an SUV, too. It’s all very smart – but stops short of anything approaching true involvement.

And while a newly slippery aero profile (under 0.3Cd, beating a Ferrari Enzo) ensures the new Tiguan is quiet and placid at a cruise, the ride quality – particularly at low speeds – could be much better resolved.

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A caveat is that VW only laid on top-spec Tiguans for us to drive, on either 19- or 20-inch alloys, and the base 17s and 18s might mitigate this problem.

But crikey is it boisterous over low-speed bumps and ruts, which feels like a facepalm when so many of these will trundle to and from suburban school gates or office car parks.

Another footnote is that we predominantly tried cars with the optional dynamic chassis control – perhaps a more balanced passive setup will strike a fairer balance.

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At least the interior is a paragon of comfort. There are still no proper climate controls, but everything else is intuitive and the massive (albeit optional) 15-inch touchscreen hovers reasonably well in your field of vision (a 12.9-inch display is standard).

A ChatGPT-boosted voice command system is designed to alleviate how often you flick your eyes from the road to fiddle with stuff, too, but in practice, it feels a bit of a work in progress.

It handles in-car requests reasonably well but fluffs its lines as you try increasingly obtuse trivia queries. Expect its abilities to ramp up with updates, however.

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What about the old-fashioned stuff?

The Tiguan has barely grown in its jump from Mk2 to Mk3, all the better for parking it easily in cities – something the car can optionally do itself, even remotely for the last 50 metres of your journey.

Yet boot space has swelled by 37 litres for a total of 652L with the rear seats still in place or a stocky 1650L once they’re flipped down.

Keep ‘em up and there’s decent space for two adults, not least because VW has ensured there’s plenty of room to tuck feet under the front seats, a common demerit in fully electric crossovers.

The bench slides fore and aft and the seatbacks can recline. Quality is pretty high too, with plush materials where your eyes and hands most frequently fall and harder-wearing plastics where they don’t. Heated, vented and massaging seats all lie on the options list or within plusher trim levels.

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Is it worth waiting for the 2025 Tiguan?

This is one heck of a competitive segment, but Tiguan gen-three appears to make a selling point of blending into the background.

No wild design language or radical switch to full electrification here; traditional values sit at its core, perhaps to prove VW has sat up and paid attention to recent ergonomic critique.

This interior feels like it was too far down the line for a full fix, but it’s an improvement on early Mk8 Golfs, and the car beneath it handles tautly. It’s just a shame the ride is so tough, at least on the big rims.

Australian sales start in late 2024 and though we doubt you’re salivating in anticipation, this new Tiguan feels like a neatly if conservatively put-together option in a crowded marketplace.