New Volkswagen Tiguan Diesel Vs Honda CR-V 2.2 Diesel

August 19, 2008
Filed under Comparison Test

New Volkswagen Tiguan Diesel Vs Honda CR-V 2.2 Diesel

Most motoring Journalists I know have pictures of cars on their computer desktops. These change every few months or even weeks as their mood or interests change. Most of them are either classic cars or concepts. Two months ago mine was a Lotus 25 Coventry Climax, followed by a Ferrari 250 GTO and currently it’s a 69 Pontiac GTO judge.

Two years ago it was a VW called Concept A (nicknamed Marrakesh by the Media), a baby Touareg on steroids with a coupe-like roofline, big wheels, a futuristic glow-in-the-dark interior and suicide rear doors. I had high hopes for the ‘Marrakesh’, but by the 2007 Frankfurt motor show, it had morphed into the Tiguan. Corporate vampires had sucked all the excitement out of it. I was underwhelmed.

Fast forward to late 2008, when the Tiguan 2.O TDI arrives in India with some solid, even stellar, European reviews behind its odd-sounding name. Georg Kacher liked it so much he bought one after reviewing it for CAR UK.

Parked next to the Tiguan is the Honda CR-V 2.2 diesel, a car that I’ve fallen for in a big way because of its rock-solid reliability, economy, practicality and versatility. It looks like the perfect family car to me. The Honda is a benchmark in the growing small SUV segment, and VW will want the Tiguan to steal a piece of its action.

To make things even more interesting, we threw the petrol 1.4 TSI Tiguan into the mix as well. Even though the engine won’t be coming to India, we were interested to see if this cheaper super and turbo-charged car could compete against the bigger capacity diesels in the performance and economy stakes, especially with the price of petrol reaching scary proportions.

STYLING
Comme si, comme sa. Six of one, a half dozen of the other. The Honda has a ‘who stole my bottom false teeth’ overbite in the front and I’m still disappointed with VW for abandoning the good looking Concept A in favour of ‘corporate design language’. Neither car will win any beauty competitions.

But personality, charm and character will always triumph over superficial good looks and both cars have under-the-skin good stuff in spades. Some of the odd angles and lines on the Honda soften with familiarity and the Polo-esque front and Touareg-like back of the Tiguan started to look rather good as the days rolled by.

INTERIOR
This is Ground Zero for softroaders, the place where whole families have to spend quality time together in comfort. Get the interior wrong, and it won’t matter how good the car is off-road or how beautiful it looks in the car park at the shopping mall.

Of the two cars, the cabin of the Tiguan feels more compact that the CR-V’s, and with the seats in their normal position boot space is 470-litre in the VW compared to the Honda’s 556-litre.

The Honda’s interior is a study in practicality. The rear seats can slide forwards or backwards to give you more boot space or more legroom, or they can fold forward to house large items in the back. There’s a removable parcel shelf that splits the boot into two levels. The big storage binnacle between the two front seats has a sliding cover, and there’s an additional cubbyhole in the fascia on the front passenger’s side. The gearshift is mounted on the dash and falls to hand comfortably. Leather seats are standard on the z.z i-CTDi and all materials are top class. It’s not necessarily a luxurious interior, but the build quality is great.

By contrast the interior of the Tiguan has the more luxurious feel to it. Our test units came in top trim, which adds 17in alloys and chrome roof rails on the outside as well as leather sport seats, cruise control and tinted windows. The leather seats are very, very good. The instrumentation and parts of the fascia have been lifted from the Golf V, so you get soft touch surfaces, knobs that are easy to reach and operate and superior fit and finish.

In the country where we tested the two cars, you can spec your Tiguan up with a bank vault full of optional goodies like the excellent touchscreen satnav at Rs 1.35Lakh, ‘Park Assist’ at Rs 27,000 that parallel parks the car for you (it works), a rearview camera at Rs 25,000 and a lot more, but that pushes the sticker price into ‘what are you smoking’ territory. Even without these the Tiguan still has the best interior in its class.

PERFORMANCE
It was an interesting exercise comparing not only the two diesels, but pitting them against state-of-the art small capacity petrol as well.

If you’re the kind of person that buys your cars based on 0 100km/h times, the 1.4-litre Tiguan gets your vote.

During testing it was the quickest of the three, sprinting to 100km/h in 9.48seconds compared to 9.61s of the Honda CR-V and the 10.87seconds of the diesel Tiguan. And at Rs 14.6 Lakh for the 1.4 compared to the 17.2Lakh for its diesel brother and 18.6Lakh (all prices in the country where we tested the two cars) for the Honda, it seems like a bargain, right? Not quite.

In the real world, tractability – that ability to press down the accelerator and surge past the car in front of you without changing gear – is more important. Our test figures confirm that this is where the petrol gets booted by the torque-endowed diesels.

Make no mistake. The 1390CC engine is a technological marvel and points the way forward for petrol engines. The supercharger keeps things moving up to 3000rpm at which point the turbocharger kicks in. Drive it carefully and you’ll get fuel economy that rivals if not betters that of the diesels. The problem is that you can’t baby it along. You have to keep shifting it through the rev range because the Tiguan is not the smallest of cars, which then eats away your fuel economy. It feels like the gutsy 1.4 litre has bitten off more that it can chew.

So it becomes a straight fight between the two diesels. The Honda and the VW share the same power output at I03kW, but the slightly larger 2.2 litre of the CR-V claims a 20Nm torque advantage over the Tiguan’s 320Nm. This translates into faster sprint times for the Honda, although in-gear acceleration is pretty similar.

The Honda’s power delivery is more linear on the open road compared to the VW where you can feel the turbo boost kicking in. But the new common-rail diesel in the Tiguan is quieter and ultimately the smoother engine of the two.

HANDLING
On paper both are 4X4 SUV’s. On tar they’re mostly front-wheel drive cars, with the artificial intelligence to send torque to the rear wheels when needed. This endows both the CR-V and the Tiguan with the Holy Grail attribute of softroaders, the ‘car -like drive’.

There’s very little the average sedan can do on tar that these two can’t match. Their ride quality and agility is good and they’re remarkably stable at high speeds. There’s not a lot of feel and feedback on the steering, but of the two the Tiguan was better communicator. The CR-V fought back with the better gearbox, which has always been a Honda strongpoint.

VW and Honda know that their potential customers rate a comfortable ride, a commanding seating position and practical space higher than serious off-road ability. Most CR-V and Tiguan owners will never take their cars off the tar, never mind the beaten track. In case they do, both cars will handle gravel roads just fine.

VERDICT
Volkswagen might be a late entrant in this segment, but even the Honda diesel is not on sale in India yet. Volkswagen is studying the competition and the needs of potential customers. We always thought the CR-V, especially in diesel guise (when we drove it in the UK), would be a tough act to follow, but the Tiguan proved to be up to the task.

Whereas the Honda has the more practical interior, the Tiguan beats it on luxury and refinement. The CR-V is slightly more powerful, but the VW’s powerplant is smoother. The German car has the better steering. They’re both top of their class, but the winner might eventually be determined by one of two things price and reputation for reliability. Internationally, VW’s cheaper if you keep your hand out of the options jar. And outright performance figures aren’t exactly what is going to drive sales in this segment. The Tiguan looks like a more comfortable, more luxurious car from the inside, and the fact will appeal to the Indian customers a lot.

We will still wait for the two cars to be launched in the country and test them in home conditions before giving you the final verdict, but for now, the Tiguan seems to have its nose ahead of the Honda, even though by a very small margin. Seems like Honda finally have something seriou s to think about, after ages.