Volkswagen Touareg R Review and Prices

The Touareg R is no less roomy than the regular model when it comes to cramming bodies into the seats.

You’d have to be a bit of a freak of nature not to get comfortable behind the wheel, with loads of head and legroom for even the tallest driver. The front seats come with 14-way electric adjustment as standard to help you find your ideal seating position.There’s plenty of adjustment in the steering wheel too, and there’s absolutely loads of leg and headroom to let you stretch out.

Those seats also come with ventilation and a massage function, although this feels more like the seat’s gently breathing beneath you than a full-blown massage. The seats are the same as you get in lesser R-Line models, however, so they don’t hug you in place like the sports seats in something like a Porsche Cayenne.

There’s tonnes of space in the back seats, though. A six-foot-tall passenger will have loads of space to stretch out behind an equally tall driver and there’s loads of space for them to tuck their feet under the front seats.

The back seats recline slightly too, so passengers can doze off on long drives. There’s enough space to carry three adults at once, but the central seat’s raised above the outer two and there isn’t quite as much headroom as you get in an Audi SQ7.

If you regularly carry much younger passengers, you’ll find it’s a doddle to fit a child seat. The VW Touareg’s back doors open nice and wide and the Isofix anchor points are easy to access once you’ve removed their protective covers. The Touareg’s huge rear windows mean kids get a good view out too, so they shouldn’t feel car sick on long journeys.

Unfortunately, you can’t get any VW Touareg with a third row of seats. You can slide the rear seats forwards and backwards as standard, however, so you can prioritise either boot space or back-seat legroom.

There’s a decent number of handy cubby spaces in the VW Touareg’s cabin. All four door bins are big enough to carry a one-litre bottle and the cupholders in the centre console are wide enough to comfortably hold a large flask.

The glovebox isn’t especially roomy and the storage tray under the huge central armrest is quite shallow, but you get a storage tray under the dashboard with a wireless charging pad for your phone as standard. There’s also a USB port and a 12V socket beside this and you get a small tray on the driver’s side for your keys.

Passengers in the back get two USB ports and another 12V socket, along with a folding armrest with two built-in cup holders. Annoyingly, these are placed in exactly the spot where you’d usually rest your arm.

The only compromise the Touareg R demands over the standard car in terms of space is in the boot.

Because of the plug-in hybrid system’s bulky battery pack, the boot floor has been raised a touch, cutting 70 litres from the total capacity. However, that still leaves a massive 740-litre space, which is 90 litres more than a BMW X5 M. That’s the biggest upside to a lack of a third row of seats.

Its wide opening and square shape make it easy to pack bulky luggage, and there’s almost no load lip to lift heavy items over. It doesn’t come with a split bootlid like some alternatives, but you can lower the Touareg’s ride height by 4cm in cars with adjustable suspension to make it even easier to load.

The back seats fold in a three-way (40:20:40) split so you can carry some passengers in the back and some long luggage poking through from the boot at the same time. There’s also a set of levers by the boot opening to let you fold the back seats down, but you have to push the seats down from the back doors to lock them in place.

Once folded, the 1730-litre space is hugely useful. Oh, and one benefit of the raised boot floor in the Touareg R is that, unlike the standard car, it has a fully flat load bay to make sliding items in and out a breeze. Who says a smaller boot is a bad thing?