The Golf has been the cornerstone of Volkswagen’s worldwide sales juggernaut since the 1970s, but it is finally showing signs of slowing. Enter the T-Roc, which is due in SA in the second half of 2018.
A compact crossover built to take the Golf’s interior size package and make it taller, the T-Roc is the third and last of VW’s SUV/crossover fleet.
When so much of your business is built on one car, the smart play is to hedge your bets in case something bad happens to it (the Golf even lost European market supremacy for two months in 2017), which is what VW has finally done.
Just over 250mm shorter than the Tiguan, the T-Roc sits on the same basic MQB chassis and electronic architecture, which is enough to make it clearly a class smaller and still a €20,000 starter in Germany, although local pricing has yet to be decided.
"The T-Roc sets a new benchmark in the booming SUV segment," says VW’s board of management chairman, Herbert Diess. "With its functionality, dynamic handling and technology, the T-Roc embodies all good Volkswagen qualities and will give our SUV offensive added momentum."
The third SUV off the architecture (the Atlas/Teramont which is not available in SA also uses it), the T-Roc will be sold as either front or all-wheel drive and come with six engine options, three petrol motors and three diesels.
"We assume that over the next 10 years the annual global sales volume of this small SUV will grow from about 6.4-million units today to about 10.6-million units," Jürgen Stackmann, VW’s board member for sales and marketing, suggests.
The cheapest, front-drive T-Roc will run to just a 1.0l petrol engine, with 85kW of power and 200Nm of torque, but the range will run through VW’s still-new 1.5l, turbo four at 110kW/250Nm to top out at the 2.0l TSI with 140kW and 320Nm.
The diesels begin with the 1.6l turbo at 85kW and 250Nm, passing though an array of 110kW/340Nm 2.0l turbos before topping out at the most expensive T-Roc, the 140kW/ 400Nm 2.0l turbodiesel.
The base petrol engine and the 1.5 four will come with front-wheel drive, while all-wheel drive (via VW’s 4Motion system) will arrive attached to both the 1.5 four and the 2.0l unit.
The base T-Roc 1.0l only comes with a six-speed manual gearbox, while the front-drive 1.5 uses either the six-speed manual or a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission. Both the front and all-wheel drive 2.0l turbos use either a six-speed manual gearbox or the dual-clutch, while the most powerful diesel only comes with a dual-clutch unit.
There’s no official word on electrification yet, but a plug-in hybrid T-Roc, based on the Golf GTE, will arrive during its pre-facelift life cycle, but a full battery electric version is unlikely.
It’s based around the MQB, with a four-link rear suspension and a multilink front end.
The five-seat T-Roc might be Golf-based, but it still offers 445l of luggage capacity (the 60:40 backrest can be folded to increase that to 1,290l) and will arrive in either Sport or Style (with two-tone paintwork) modes. Adaptive chassis control, with active dampers, is an option and it gets the Golf GTi-derived progressive steering.
Sitting on a 2,603mm wheelbase (78mm shorter than the Tiguan’s), it has far shorter front and rear overhangs than its big brother, with 174mm less metal and plastic ahead of the wheel centres than the Tiguan.
At 1,819mm wide, it is only 20mm narrower than the
second-generation, mid-sized crossover and, at 1,573mm high, its roofline is 70mm lower. Its front track width is 1,546mm and the rear is 5mm narrower and it all rides on standard 17-inch wheels and tyres.
The interior can be ordered with the fully digital 11.3-inch Active Info Display instrument cluster, though a pair of analogue gauges makes up the standard display. While the biggest of the multimedia screens is an eight-inch touchscreen unit, a 6.5-inch version comes as standard on the entry-level models.
The driver’s hip height is 572mm, while the rear seats are higher at 618mm to deliver
stadium-style seating and bet-ter vision.
VW has worked hard on connectivity with the T-Roc, delivering a range of smartphone apps through its Car-Net system, which is controlled via either the infotainment system or the Active Info Display.
It uses App Connect, the system that integrates Mirrorlink, Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto, while VW also joined forces with Discover Media for a Guide and Inform service with point-of-interest searches, car-park availability and pricing, online traffic information and weather, although it is unclear what will be available in SA.
The front of the cabin includes two USB ports inside the console’s storage box, beneath the climate control panel, while there’s an optional inductive charging system for compatible phones.
VW turned to Apple’s Beats audio operation to tune an eight-channel, 300W sound system for the T-Roc’s interior.
There’s a dizzying array of electronic safety nets, too, ranging from pedestrian monitoring to automatic braking, from adaptive cruise control (which runs at up to 210km/h) to a parking assistant and from a lane-change alert system to the Level 2 autonomy of a traffic-jam assistant.
LED headlights front the top-spec versions of the T-Roc, giving the car a shallow-light look, while the daytime running lights have moved to sit inside the front bumper.
Radically different while somehow retaining VW’s conservative, edgy styling cues, the T-Roc has something of a convoluted name, representing the "T" words for the rest of the SUV range (including the Touareg) and "Roc" for "Rock", meaning, er, something.
"The ‘T’ refers to the car’s successful frontrunners, the Tiguan and Touareg, whose SUV DNA and strengths have been transferred to the new model — the high seating position, the robust qualities of the body and running gear and the all-wheel-drive system that is included as standard for the top engines," VW’s director of development, Frank Welsch, says.
"The ‘Roc’ in the name has been derived from the English ‘Rock’, which stands for the positioning of the T-Roc as a crossover that combines the dominance of an SUV with the agility of a compact hatchback model and the dynamism of the compact class," Welsch says.
"This car really rocks the segment — sometimes louder and sometimes more subdued, according to its specific options and colour combination."
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