Volkswagen T-Roc SEL 1.6 TDI 115
- For those about T-Roc... will this suit you?
- Choosing our T-Roc: the price of personality
- It's a whole kangaroo thing...
- Sales are T-Rocking - but why?
- Avoid this Volkswagen diesel. Duh.
- Drop tops and hot shops
- Real MPG: we're warming up now
- Stereo upgrade? Anything Beats this...
- The lost art of driving LOLs
For those about T-Roc... will this suit you?
We welcome a Volkswagen T-Roc onto the Honest John fleet. Is this the company's best pound-for-pound crossover?
Date: 23 September 2019 | Current mileage: 1000 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: TBC
Okay, welcome to the latest in a quite long line of SUV shaped Volkswagen Automotive Group [sic] things that’s joined the HJ fleet: the Volkswagen T-Roc.
I reviewed one of these, video style, about a year ago and even then I was palpably bored by the amount of SUV-shaped cars shooting out of the VAG. I spent some time hammering that point home, see…
Ultimately I decided that I like the T-Roc even though it’s on the expensive side, particularly if you want one with a bit of colour thrown in. It’s generally very good… so good that you might consider it a cheap Tiguan.
Since then, though, Big VAG has spat out another crossover SUV. Of course it has. And this one, the T-Cross, is also still quite expensive, but slightly less so because it’s marginally smaller than the T-Roc, albeit still a five-seater with a big boot. I've done a video style review on one of those too, if you're interested...
It’s churlish to criticise Volkswagen for giving us choice, I suppose, and actually, as much as you could feasibly run a T-Cross as a family car, it would be a squeeze. That’s not the case with the T-Roc, which I genuinely believe is where the smart money goes on an SUV with a VW badge on the front. It looks great, is generally cheap to run, has proper family car space and yet a relatively small footprint.
And it really does feel like 8/10ths of a Tiguan in the refinement stakes – and would be even closer if the dashboard was slush moulded instead of being retrograde hard plastic.
I say this with experience: this time last year I was running a Tiguan. It was the most boring long-term test car I’ve ever had. (Apart from maybe the Volvo S40 DRIVe I had before anyone trusted me with anything quick.) This T-Roc though, with its red roof and its marginally ridiculous matching dashboard, feels more…well…more me.
Stay tuned over the next six months and I’ll let you know how we get on.
Choosing our T-Roc: the price of personality
The T-Roc is the most customisable - if that's the right word - of all the Volkswagens. It ain't cheap though.
Date: 23 September 2019 | Current mileage: 1500 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 46mpg
The T-Roc is more definitively aimed at da yoof market than anything else Volkswagen does, I’d argue. How comes, bruv?
Because you can make the roof, the wheels and the dashboard a stupid colour, is what it boils down to. I mean, the Germans have been pedalling the whole personalisation shtick for two decades in the CAPS LOCK MINI, but it’s still a bit odd being able to give a high riding German SUV (technically) a red roof. Like seeing Angela Merkel dancing, Teresa May style.
Let’s pull this back in before the stereotyping veers into the offensive. What I’m getting at is that I got the chance to build this T-Roc from scratch and it was marginally more interesting than I expected it to be. Here’s the car I picked:
I managed to resist orange, somehow, but it was very important to me that this thing stood out. It’s easy to mock VW (or any car company) for overegging the personalisation thing, but I must say that when you’re sat there building your car on the internet, and the internet says you can have a contrasting coloured roof…you’re gunsta get a contrasting coloured roof.
So, to get the red and white thing happening you need to pick Design spec or above, for some reason, which means spending £22,500 at least; you can have red and black with lower specs, but not white and red. Oh well. We ended up going one up from Design and for SEL - bigger wheels, better seats, LED headlights...just an altogether nicer set of stuff. The paintjob costs £785 by the way.
But, again, the main thing we wanted was for our T-Roc to stand out - not least becaus there are so many of them on the road now, which we'll talk about another day. And so, we just had to stick a red dashboard in it. Ready?
...ta dah! It's a lot isn't it? Best £295 I've ever spent on a car option though. Honestly, the lack of slush moulding (soft-touch plastic, that is) means that a basic T-Roc can feel just that...basic. But for me this really lifts the cabin. And it's not even that distracting once you get used to it.*
Other boxes we ticked include a Winter Pack (£300) for the arse-warming seats, keyless entry because I still think it's the best car feature ever invented (£395), better wheels...well...because, and a Dr. Dre Stereo.** It's £425 worth of rubbish, it turns out. We'll talk about that at some point too.
This is canny boring isn't it? We'll stop there. This is our car. It would cost you £29,750 to buy. We'll go through it all as the weeks go by, but its really interesting and we really like it so far. See ya.
*That's a joke. It's never remotely distracting.
**Beats, that is.
It's a whole kangaroo thing...
An alternative version of our T-Roc reminds us of a specific problem with Volkswagen's 1.5 TSI engine
Date: 7 October 2019 | Current mileage: 1800 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 45mpg
So owing to a manufacturing problem, Mackem-mobile (because of the red and white, see) was delayed for a few months. Part of the issue was high demand on the 1.5 TSI petrol engine we’d initially ordered, no doubt in response to the lack of faith people generally have in VWG diesels. And diesels in general. Also that engine is cracking, so there’s that too.
Thankfully Volkswagen had a solution. It would send us a car from the press fleet for a bit, then have our car built with a diesel engine instead. For me that was great… I mean, I hate diesels – especially low end four-cylinder ones – but the chance to compare like-for-like is good.
And so it was that a yellow-gold (Turmeric Yellow, officially) T-Roc turned up, powered by a 1.5 TSI and with a manual gearbox. First things first: the colour is ace. I mean, the matching dashboard is absolutely sickening but I liked that too, for some reason. Not many cars have yellow dashboards. I was beginning to regret Mackem-mobile's colour choice.
Then the kangarooing started.
Yep, this is a known issue in Big VAG Towers* and it seems to affect every car that the 1.5 TSI is fitted to across all the Group stuff. That’s a whole lot of cars – we’re talking this thing, Polo, Golf, Audi A1, SEAT Arona, some Skodas… loads of them. No Lamborghinis or Bugattis, like. Phew.
It’s an issue I’d come across already in the Audi A1 I drove for this video, but to be honest it’s one of those things you can easily write off as either a one-off or, to be perfectly honest, a lazy left leg. But in the T-Roc it was even worse than in the Audi, mainly because of the greater bulk of the car and the softer springs exaggerating the effect. It made pulling away in the car smoothly an irritating exercise in biped precision.
It’s a real shame, because in every other way the 1.5 TSI engine is an absolute cracker. Smooth, relatively powerful, economical…just a lovely alternative to a rattly diesel engine. And characterful too, which is rare. The last thing Volkswagen told us, back in January, is that it was “developing a solution to prevent these rare effects in the affected vehicles” so maybe if you order one now it’ll be unaffected, but my advice to you is to check on the issue with your dealer before ordering. And if they’re elusive – which let’s face it, they probably will be – make sure you test drive a recently built 1.5 TSI and see what you think first.
Because even with the kangaroo thing, personally it’s still an engine I’d choose over the 1.6 TDI diesel that our long termer has. I’ll tell you why later.
Sales are T-Rocking - but why?
The Volkswagen T-Roc is selling like post-Brexit food parcels...but why is it so popular?
Date: 21 October 2019 | Current mileage: 2000 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 48mpg
When Volkswagen unveiled the T-Roc back in 2017 - finally, having first announced the car as a concept all the way back in 2014 - it didn't make perfectmiss sense. Could this be a rare misstep from the mighty VAG? I mean, here was a car with notably less interior space and significantly lower ostensible quality than the Tiguan, but only a few grand cheaper. And yet too big to be a proper compact crossover really. An SUV too far?
Nope. Turns out the T-Roc has hit a sweet spot. Anecdotally you see them everywhere these days, but objectively it's a sales smash. Not only has it crept into the UK's monthly top five sellers once or twice, but during August (2019) the T-Roc was Europe's third best-selling car, topping 18,000 sales. That represented a massive 28% sales improvement year-on-year. Only the Dacia Duster and the Volkswagen Golf beat it. It's set to become one of Europe's best selling cars this year.
I can see why. It's packaged perfectly, in my opinion: small enough to feel like a proper city car, tall enough to feel safe and commanding in that SUV-ish way, spacious enough to be a useable family wagon. That's the job it does for us - two adults, two kids aged 11 and 12. In that context, I couldn't give a monkey's about the crap quality plastics.
And what does that even mean, anyway? Like, if you knock the dash top it makes a tappy sound instead of a dampened thump, but never once has our T-Roc's interior cracked or creaked. And sure, the Tiguan we ran felt a little more hefty - that's the endgame for slush moulded dash plastics, basically - but I'd take this cabin over that one any day. It works the same and looks more interesting.
Back to the packaging, the other day I parked the T-Roc nose-to-tail with a MINI Clubman and side-by-side our car looked strikingly compact. This baffled me, because I know how cramped MINIs are inside, even when they're a sort-of estate MINI, and I know that the word MINI means small, even in 2019 when it's spelled with CAPS LOCK ON. (I'm not here for a debate about new MINI, by the way - I like new MINI and most of what it does, I'm just making a point.)
So I looked up the measurements and...damn, MINI is longer. It's 4253mm to the T-Roc's 4234mm. Clubman or not, you'd probably expect a MINI and a VW SUV to be further apart than that, and certainly with the MINI on the shorter side. Anyway, what I'm saying is that the T-Roc pulls off that thing of feeling small and big at the same time.
I'd buy one. Sorry to ruin the ending for you - we're only a third of the way through the 12 updates you'll get for this car - but I already know it's a car I'd put my own money into. That rarely happens with a long-term test car.
I wouldn't buy this particular one though, with a 1.6 diesel and a manual gearbox. I'll tell you why next time.
Avoid this Volkswagen diesel. Duh.
**spoiler alert** This update isn't about #dieselgate. Sorry.
Date: 28 October 2019 | Current mileage: 2200 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 55mpg (!)
**spoiler alert**
The following update has nothing to do with the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal. If you want to get your #dieselgate fix, do a click here. Sorry.
It's a long story...actually it's not, it's a boring one...but we ordered a petrol T-Roc and ended up with a diesel one. Something to do with production, which I guess is something to do with how popular T-Rocs are at the moment, and how unpopular diesels are. Especially Volkswagen ones.
Upshot was, our meticulously specificationised T-Roc would not have the 1.5 TSI engine and DSG auto combo we desired but would instead have a 1.6 TDI diesel and a manual. Cry emoji. I hate diesel. I hate the noise and the stinky fingers and the NOx. And I especially hate small capacity diesels made specifically for fuel economy purposes.
Hey ho. So far it's not ruining our experience entirely, but it's definitely a weak instrument in an otherwise kick-ass band: Lars Ulrich playing drums for Led Zeppelin, if you like. However...
In context this diesel engine is proving not so painful after all, which became very clear during a trip across the country from Newcastle to the Lake District. Yep, strap in...we're going on an mpg odyssey.
So around the doors we've been getting around the early 40s mark but during this trip, mostly on the A69 at a fairly consistent 55-60mph, we hit 60mpg at some stages, settling eventually on 55mpg over 200 or so miles. And that's the thing. This 115PS diesel is slow, no good for overtaking, quite course and generally not that pleasant from a pure driving enjoyment perspective, but bloody hell it'll give you some good fuel economy if you're gentle with it. For a five-seat family car of this size and shape anything above 50mpg is good.
Of course, we're not usually doing a steady 55-60mph on the A69, and so I still wouldn't buy this version of the car. We did have a 1.5 TSI version of this for a little while before collecting our diesel, and for all its horrible kangarooing it's generally the much nicer engine: quieter, less rattly, more personality. I'd happily sacrifice the 5-10mpg for that altogether more pleasant experience. (For reference, the 150PS 1.5 TSI manual T-Roc returns a 42.2mpg WLTP average, compared to this 115PS diesel's 53.3mpg.)
So there you go, we've done an update about fuel economy. There'll be no more of this unless something utterly weird happens. Back to the fun stuff next time... cabriolets and hot crossovers.
Drop tops and hot shops
The T-Roc is proving so popular that Volkswagen is catering to everybody with it. We're excited.
Date: 4 November 2019 | Current mileage: 2500 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 48mpg
As we've already discussed, and as you'll probably have guessed yourself if you use the roads at all, the Volkswagen T-Roc is proving something of a sales success. This has emboldened Volkswagen to do not one, but two mildly mental things with it: a 300 horsepower version and a convertible version. I'm not sure which is madder of the two. The fast one is available already, so let's start there.
The T-Roc R has 300PS from the same 2.0 turbo petrol engine in the Golf R (and loads of other fast VWG stuff), hits 62mph in a fairly stupid 4.9 seconds and costs about £39,000. For reference, that makes it a little faster than the Cupra Ateca, a little slower than the Golf R, and quite a bit more expensive than both.
Notwithstanding the idea of a smallish crossover having that much power and costing so much per se, the price feels a little uncomfortable on account of the Ateca being both bigger and built of squishier materials (if that sort of thing bothers you), while the Golf R is also higher quality and a proper dynamnic driving thing of the sort the T-Roc will struggle to be.
That last thing is absolutely vital to the success of the car: the question of how it drives. Sure, some people will buy the T-Roc R on the coimbination of looks, the prestige, straight line speed and space - but, if it drives with a "meh", more people will be put off. I'm reserving judgement, but based on how our T-Roc handles I'm quietly hopeful. Because the T-Roc handles better than most crossovers. There's a good chassis there, clearly.
And so to the altogether less blue and more grey area of the T-Roc Cabriolet. The recent history (in the UK, anyway) of convertibles based on crossovers is short and consequential by virtue of its inadequacy: the Range Rover Evoque Convertible is no longer on sale here. Which is good because it sucked.
Early evidence suggests the T-Roc Cabriolet isn't going to be a world apart. The same principle applies: take a five-door SUV and sacrifice two of those doors, lots of rear leg room, loads of boot space and most of its structural integrity, the last problem corrected by making the whole thing heavier, negatively impacting performance, efficiency and dynamic sharpness. Oh, and make it more expensive in the process. Who'd actually buy into that? For 30 grand?
And if there weren't enough showoffs here in the UK to keep the Range Rover one going, what makes Volkswagen think its run-of-the-mill crossover will do any better?
Still, there is some hope. For a start it doesn't have any clear cut rivals - the Jeep Wrangler costs £50,000 and is much bigger and clunkier than this - and there probably are quite a few folk that don't really care about practicality and dynamic degradation. Strange but true. Also, you never know... it might end up being brilliant. I hope so, for the laughs. I'll let you know.
Real MPG: we're warming up now
Our 1.6 diesel is warming through now and there's a real improvement in economy.
Date: 11 November 2019 | Current mileage: 2800 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 51.6mpg
The image you see below shows that the T-Roc has returned 51.6mpg of late. That's not just a carefully planned motorway run either, it's a full tank: 400-odd miles across 14 hours doing the commute, basically. Look at the average speed. Fair play. We appear to have run in the engine properly now, after 2500-3000 miles.
The 1.6-litre 115PS diesel engine in our T-Roc might be one of the dullest fitted to any new car at the moment, but you have to give Volkswagen a great deal of credit for making it this economical. If you want your just-about-family-sized SUV to return economy more akin to a city car, here it is. Just don't try overtaking anything, ok?
The good stuff goes on. Because this car is so power deficient, and so safe, and so secure, its insurance group rating is just 12E. That's the same as a Ford Fiesta ST Line Ecoboost. A runabout, in other words. And I mean, sure, the BIK tax is high if you're a company car driver (31% if you're a 20% tax payer) but that's diesel these days, right. That's not going to change.
I've said this before but this is another example of the T-Roc hitting the family car sweet spot: small and economical enough to be a great, fairly cost effective town car (saying nothing of how much you can spend buying one of these), but big enough to be a proper family motor. That's how we're using it.
Have a look at the T-Roc's Real MPG page and you'll see that it's doing well across the board, registering a 44mpg average across all models and 53.3mpg from the 1.6 diesel in particular. (Note that the official mpg rating on our page is from the old and less realistic NEDC test, rather than the WLTP one that generates today's 51.6mpg figure.) So, in conclusion, we're not the only ones enjoying pleasing efficiency from the T-Roc.
What else is happening in with our T-Roc...? Apart from it being pretty much the perfect family craphole? I say that in the nicest possible way, because it's a family car and we have two kids and they're messy. And we're not much better, it turns out. We'd probably see a 5mpg economy bump if we just emptied out all the old coffee cups and sweet wrappers and coats and rucksacks.
Nothing else for now. Just doing the work run and that, being all slow and 50mpg and red-roofed. **shrug sholders emoji**
Oh, but I absolutely hate the stereo and I want to talk about that soon. I'll say this for now: Dr. Dre had nothing to do with the Beats system in the T-Roc. If he did he ought to be ashamed of himself, because it's about as suited to rap music as an evangelical pastor. (WARNING: the language behind that link will be deeply offensive to some.) No time left here, but we'll do that for...ahem...the next episode. Hey hey hey-ee yey!
Stereo upgrade? Anything Beats this...
Thinking of upgrading to a Beats stereo in your Volkswagen Group car? Think carefully...
Date: 22 November 2019 | Current mileage: 3000 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 51mpg
Our T-Roc is furnished with £425 worth of stereo upgrade. A Beats stereo, specifically. Beats by Dr. Dre, more specifically. Beats Electronics by Dr. Dre, a subsidiary of Apple Corporation, even more specifically.
To explain a bit, Apple bought Beats Electronics from Dr. Dre and his partner, music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine, for a reported $3.2bn in 2014 – a deal that Dre nearly derailed when he boasted about becoming the “first billionaire in hip hop” during a YouTube stream before the official announcement. The whole saga is laid out in an amazing episode of The Defiant Ones on Netflix. Well worth a watch.
Ironically the company had been started almost a decade earlier largely in response to Dre’s dissatisfaction with Apple’s poor quality standard issue ear buds. Dre’s involvement meant the company immediately became the go-to brand for over-ear (or in-ear) virtue signalling.
It didn’t necessarily matter that the Beats headphones themselves were met with mixed reviews. That’s the power of a credible figurehead: think Lewis Hamilton starting a car company. Not just signing an endorsement deal, but actually starting it. Then selling it to Tesla.
Anyways, the Apple deal saw Beats move beyond just making headphones. The name spearheaded a music streaming service (which would later become Apple Music) and saw the company sign partnerships for in-car entertainment with Fiat-Chrysler and Volkswagen. And so it is that our T-Roc has a Beats stereo.
It’s poor. Probably the worst stereo upgrade I’ve ever had in a car. I’m even including the one SEAT does, developed in-house, called… SEAT Sound. (Actually a very good system, dreadful name aside.) Volkswagen would have been better off using that. It’d be more profitable on account of not costing anything in licensing to use (presumably), and it could be branded any which way they like. Stick ‘Stormzy’ on the Up version and ‘James Blunt’ on the Sharan. Job done.
The Beats system has a 400W output and a specific digital sound processor, but whatever processing it's doing doesn’t result in any real depth or tonal warmth. It’s more like a bass booster for a standard, very average-sounding car audio system. It has a three-slider EQ compared to SEAT Sound’s five, for example. But most perplexing is how quickly it distorts. If you could expect just one thing from a Dr. Dre stereo upgrade, it would be bone-shattering bass at face melting volume. This thing can barely make half volume before it starts to break apart like Kanye West’s grip on reality.
In fairness, it is reasonably priced compared to other stereo upgrades, is still better than the standard stereo, of course, and it’s physically well packaged – the bass driver sits inside the spare wheel rather than replacing it. And so, despite all of the above, we’d still recommend it. It’ll give you something to moan about, at least – a proper rare treat in the sanitised, harmonised, engineered-to-bland-pefection world of Volkswagen Group products.
The lost art of driving LOLs
Crossovers are killing the driving experience...but there's hope.
Date: 20 December 2019 | Current mileage: 3250 | Claimed economy: 50.4mpg [WLTP] | Actual economy: 49mpg
Everyone loves a crossover now. The 'dual purpose vehicle' is the fastest growing segment in Europe, and has been for about a decade now; a little more than 130,000 crossovers were sold in the UK in 2009, compared to half a million in 2018. Near enough 300% growth. Unbelievable, Jeff.
I have no problem with this...well, just the one, which we'll get to. Mainly though, crossovers are generally more spacious, safer and more suited to family use then any other sort of car with a similar footprint. You could argue that fuel efficiency would be improving more quickly if design trends tended towards less bulky shapes than the two-box SUV. Estates, say. Fair enough, but effficiency is improving nonetheless.
Like, who'd have thought that a family SUV would be able to return fuel economy consistently in the high 40s? But that's what our T-Roc is giving us. Yep, a dirty VAG diesel knocking on the door of 50mpg. And sure, it's slow and a bit noisy and quite uncouth, and in fact the T-Roc isn't that big - only just a family car, really - but still, it's difficult to argue with.
Unless you actually like driving, that is. Unlike the family hatchback segment, which has been awash with brilliantly dymanic five-seaters for decades now, the crossover segment is...well it's basically rubbish.
Off the top of my head I could name you half a dozen crossovers that are clumsy to drive at best, plain horrible at worst: Dacia Duster, Vauxhall Mokka X, Citroen C3 Aircross, Ford Ecosport, Fiat 500X. I'll let you think of a sixth yourself.
The aforementioned are all very good in their own ways - they're not bad cars - but they're not the sort of car you could possibly enjoy driving, in the traditional sense of that feeling you get going around a corner in a well sorted out car. Know what I mean? They're numb, they roll, they're usually noisy in a bad way. To drive a Ford Fiesta back to back with a Dacia Duster is to but Jet from Gladiators on the Krypton Factor against Eric Bristow.
But here's the but: the T-Roc. Despite what I said a few paragraphs ago, and what your assumption probably is, the T-Roc is actually good to drive. Sure it's no Fiesta - physics dictate it can't ever be - but back to our '80s game show example, it's at least got a shot against lovely Jet. It's...erm...it's Lizzie Webb from TVAM. Also, I've just driven the new Ford Puma, and although I'm not allowed to tell you anything about it until January 13th, it's in this paragraph, so...
There you have it. Driving LOLs might be a lost art at the moment, in the sense that there are a depressing number of depressingly uneventful-to-drive cars that are depressingly popular. But the tide mught just...just...be shifting. Thanks in part to the T-Roc. Merry Christmas.
