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Volkswagen Tiguan vs Kia Sportage vs BMW X1

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The crossover has reached the other side. What started as a niche of mainstream hatch alternatives combining a touch of SUV style with car-like manners has become the establishment it was so keen to upset. This year more high-rise hatches will be sold than ever before, and we’ll likely spend more time writing about them as a result.

So, we’re looking at a quiet giant of the almost-SUV game. Born in 2007 when an atomic accident at Wolfsburg’s R&D centre resulted in a Mk5 Golf being fitted with the body of a Renault 4 and the springs from a monster truck, the Tiguan has been a massive success for Volkswagen. Locally, even in this its run-out year, VWSA shifted almost 1200 in the first seven months despite tough trading conditions and ever-stiffer competition.

But only now is Volkswagen getting serious. The new Tiguan is substantially bigger, and hungrier than before, reaching up towards Touareg territory in both space and price. The latest Tiguan is built from VW’s MQB platform, the automotive equivalent of the suspicious vat of brown slop Indian restaurants use as the building block for every dish from tepid to teary. So far MQB has been used on the expected VW Golf and Audi A3, but has also showed its versatility by appearing in the TT. Now it’s turning its hand to SUVs, and we’ve every right to expect it to do that equally well.

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Not that the Tiguan has things all its own way. If you’re looking for a premium product there’s in-house rival Audi’s older Q3, the Benz GLA, and BMW’s now substantially less ugly X1. Plus a glut of Qashqai/CX-5/Kadjar mass-market offerings if you’re not fussed about the snob appeal. You can add Kia’s Sportage to that list too. Just as the Tiguan is for VW, the Sportage is a big earner and strong seller for Kia. With the new X1 already proving popular and all-new versions of the Tiguan and Sportage imminent, the battle for supremacy is about to get messy – so naturally, we chose a quarry to put these cars through their paces. It’s a ludicrous place to test a load of fake off-roaders, as meaningful a test at the EC combined cycle (don’t worry, we drove them on road too) but, well, we’ve been watching a lot of ’80s pop videos on Youtube lately, and isn’t this what crossovers are all about anyway? Selling the dream of escaping the drudgery of the blacktop when in fact neither car nor driver has the true grit to do it?

Heading out onto the quarry’s warren of roads I’m quickly introduced to one of this playground’s e nasty predators, enormous rock-carrying trucks the height of houses that pound the rutted tracks at scarcely believable speeds.

These are proper go-anywhere machines, some of which cost R21-million and are steered with a joystick instead of a steering wheel, yet can be driven here on a car licence and after only a couple of days’ training. Foreman Roy Dunford tells me the 2.1m tall tyres cost R380000, which is an awful lot of money for a rubber hoop, but not much for an SUV. At base level you can flirt with these cars for truck-tyre money.

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R540k for a 2.0TSI 4Motion Tiguan and R600k for the equivalent top-spec Sportage, R606k for a more powerful X1 xDrive 20 (Too much of a hurdle? Forego the awd and buy the sDrive 20d for R60k less.) So it’s safe to assume that our test cars, equipped with four-wheel drive, offer a level of performance that won’t leave you outpaced by the formation of rocks.

You can’t accuse the VW of not looking the part. Crisply styled and square-jawed, it’s every inch a mini Touareg, but even sharper. And there are a lot more of those inches than before, the Tiguan having grown in every dimension except height, which has dropped to radically reshape the proportions, giving the new car a tough stance that emphasises macho strength over Renault Kadjar-style extremism.

You better like straight lines, mind, because it’s as curvy as a Nebraskan freeway, and that strong reliance on geometric shapes continues inside. There are echoes of current Golf, unsurprisingly, but the space is on another level altogether. It feels broad in here, in the front and also in the back, and there’s plenty of headroom at both ends. The rear seats slide and recline, maximising practicality, but not all the neat tricks are merely practical ones. Some are just gadgety cool, like the optional virtual instrument pack – although that isn’t quite as spectacular as the one offered by sister company Audi, and the optional head-up display is done cheap-skate style with one of those glass plates that pops out of the dash top.

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The upper dash materials are handsome and tactile but whatever you do, don’t let your gaze drop or your hand brush much below door-handle height or you’ll be faced with plastics we might have called sub-Korean in the days before Kia really upped its game. You can’t help but wonder if VW doesn’t have to try a bit harder than this to maintain some semblance of the premium feel it so brilliantly cultivated in the late ’90s with the Mk4 Golf. Our SE Nav trim car’s virtual dials helped lift the ambience, but we’ve driven a basic car on the original launch and it was bleaker than a Venezuelan economic forecast.

There are no such disappointments with the BMW. In fact the X1’s interior is one of the company’s better efforts. Yes it looks almost exactly the same as every other BMW at a glance, but the solemnity is lifted by the snake of leather running right to left below the HVAC controls and the decent material quality. It feels narrower than the Tiguan, particularly in the front seats themselves, and across the rear bench, but headroom isn’t wanting. You sit lower in here than the other cars, which ought to reinforce the impression that this is more car than SUV, but the low and sloping dashboard’s upper surface creates the impression of a heightened driving position. And there’s no mistaking how much more roomy X1 v2 is for switching to front-wheel drive.

Yep, you read that right. This second X1 is hugely different beneath the skin. In typically confusing BMW style, the old X1 was actually based on 3 Series bits instead of the 1 Series parts logic might suggest. This time though, the X1 is based on… a Mini. That’s not so crazy; the 2 Series MPV also shares DNA with the premium micro. This is the first new BMW though that still looks like an existing BMW, but ditches the firm’s traditional rear-drive set-up for a transverse, front-wheel-drive layout that brings it into line with every other player in the market.

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Base X1s, badged sDrive, send power to the front wheels only, and even this xDrive is nominally front-drive until the rear axle is summoned to help. But it’s no poor relation when it comes to the curvy stuff. Well tied down on its M Sport-spec suspension, the X1 feels nimble and responsive, its steering making up in weight and precision what it loses in speed between the lockstops. We’ve got the 140kW 20d here, giving the BMW an unfair advantage over the other two. You feel that when it tugs you back satisfyingly in your seat on the way to 100kph in 7.6sec – a solid 1.5sec ahead of its rivals.

Sprinting through the quarry’s access roads, rooster tails of dust and mud spraying far and wide, gnarly rocks threatening to rip through low-profile tyres that simply weren’t built for this environment, the BMW pulls out a decisive lead over its rivals. That the lightest, most powerful car here should also be the quickest is no surprise. That the Kia – only slightly down on power and up on weight – should be so much slower is, however. You can feel the Sportage’s chunky 400Nm as we climb up some of the steeper hills, but in a sprint from a dead stop its 9.2sec effort pips the 24kW feebler and 160kg rounder VW by a solitary tenth.

Despite what the pictures might suggest there’s little chance here for much real off-roading in these cars. You could have a blast in a Defender, sure, but even getting to the good bits is proving too challenging for our three. Never mind whether their four-wheel-drive systems are serious enough for this caper, they just don’t have the tyres to cope with the sludgy soft mud in eerily murky pools of worryingly indeterminate depth, or the ground clearance to crawl over the walls of debris thrown to the side by the quarry trucks.

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By lunchtime the casualty list includes a mysteriously deformed front bumper on the BMW and a missing clip from the Tiguan’s rear valance that has left it hanging like a gammy leg. ‘You go on without me,’ it shouts to the others, as they scramble through the next trough of sludge. Keen to limit the damage, and having forged through mud troughs, climbed slopes you wouldn’t dream of tackling and proved that all of these cars can do anything any potential customer will ask of them, we cut our losses before anything else breaks. We load up the boots (Tiguan’s is biggest, Kia’s has highest floor) with wellies and cameras and head out on to the roads.

With the comforting feel of solid bitumen under their wheels again, all three cars feel so much more relaxed. Or maybe it’s just the drivers that do. I’m in the Kia now, a car we haven’t talked much about so far, but that’s no reflection on its desirability or capability. You sit higher than in the other cars and closer to the roof. The bluff dash is high and square, in marked contrast to the BMW’s, and covered in pleasantly soft materials that wouldn’t be remotely remarkable except for the moulded plastic fake stitched seam across the top. Is this the long-awaited answer to the far east’s much missed plastic wood?

The Kia struggles to settle on patchy surfaces, its 19in tyres bobbling at the front end, but it grips strongly and the steering, which now has its electric motor on the rack itself rather than the column, and loses that strangely notchy feel of the previous Sportage, is surprisingly brisk, pointing the car earnestly into corners.

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The Tiguan feels more composed, more polished, but it doesn’t have that sense of urgency. It’s a classic MQB chassis, in that it rides well, corners relatively flat and suits delivering a driving experience that’s short on outright thrills thanks to its relatively leisurely steering and comfort-oriented body control. It’s so confidently self assured though, spreading its talents broadly rather than focusing them, that it’s hard to dislike it for that. But gunning down some back roads it’s the BMW’s strong brakes that are executing the most satisfying stops. And when we finally hit some traffic, the X1’s eight-speed automatic ’box delivers better stop-go refinement than the Tiguan’s dual-clutch, and better control than the Kia’s, which lacks shift paddles.

When crossovers first appeared, they offered something different, a combination of SUV-style and a tiny sprinkle of off-road ability fused with car-like driving character. But now everyone is at it, it’s become harder to assert your identity. It’s like the man who gets out of his seat at the football match to get a clearer look at the penalty. Everyone else has to get up to see and no one is actually better off than they were. But still they come, and they get better with every wave. And against the odds these three cars all do feel tangibly different from one another, each having its own strengths – and its own weaknesses.

The Kia represents a solid improvement over the old Sportage in every area except perhaps styling. But it doesn’t win this test because it’s strayed too far from its comfort zone in this top trim level. The Sportage sweet spot is likely to be much further down the range, a 1.6 turbo petrol perhaps, with front- wheel drive and pretty much everything needed to keep you happy for every one of the five years its warranty lasts. Buy there and you’re buying a strong car that neither BMW or VW has an answer for. But in test-spec our high-falutin’ First Edition’s 134kW engine fails to capitalise on its power output, while offering inferior economy and CO2, and the vastly improved handling is let down by a less than perfect ride. We’re a picky bunch, and so should you be if you’re spending more than half-a-million rand on a car.

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We want more, but more of what? Which car gets the nod? It’s tough call. On paper, and on the road, it’s hard to look past the BMW. It has the most premium-feeling interior, is the best to drive, the cleanest and also the quickest here. But it’s less practical than the VW and is far pricier. We’d rather drive the BMW, and you might prefer to see that badge on your drive, but if you value versatility, and that’s very likely in this sector, the handsome and huge Tiguan is the right car.

By – CHRIS CHILTON


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