Art of Gears
Fansided

The 2021 Volkswagen Taos is an SUV-Shaped Snooze-Fest

By Andrew Steadman

ZWICKAU, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 18: The VW Logo on September 18, 2020 in Zwickau, Germany. Volkswagen will officially present the ID.4 towards the end of September. In addition, Volkswagen also produces the smaller ID.3 at the Zwickau plant. Both cars are meant to lead the company towards mass sales in the electric car market and provide it with strong competition against rival Tesla. (Photo by Jens Schlueter/Getty Images)
ZWICKAU, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 18: The VW Logo on September 18, 2020 in Zwickau, Germany. Volkswagen will officially present the ID.4 towards the end of September. In addition, Volkswagen also produces the smaller ID.3 at the Zwickau plant. Both cars are meant to lead the company towards mass sales in the electric car market and provide it with strong competition against rival Tesla. (Photo by Jens Schlueter/Getty Images) /
facebooktwitterreddit

The Volkswagen Taos is VW’s new compact SUV.

At Art of Gears, we generally try to focus on interesting cars and car-related news.

Not today.

No, today we instead highlight the Ambien-on-wheels 2021 Volkswagen Taos, which was unveiled on October 13.

The Volkswagen Taos slots into the VW lineup as the smaller version of the Tiguan, and it’s just about as boring as one would expect from such a vehicle.

To be clear, nothing about the Taos is offensive. The publicity photos show it dressed up in a snazzy dark blue color scheme, the dusk-time desert sun glinting seductively from its chrome grille accents.

It looks a bit like a less-angular Toyota RAV4, which is certainly what Volkswagen is hoping to achieve, considering the success of Toyota’s own compact SUV.

In fact, Jalopnik writes that this is absolutely VW’s attempt to jump into the compact SUV segment. Americans apparently bought four million compact crossovers last year. 4,000,000.

So, here comes the Volkswagen Taos, which is nothing more than a shrunken Tiguan. Or, put another way, it’s a more-boring, bloated, lifted Golf.

Likewise, the Taos is getting the 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine that is already utilized in the Volkswagen Jetta. It’s good for 158 horsepower. The Taos will come in front-wheel drive and 4Motion all-wheel drive flavors, as well, the former with an eight-speed automatic transmission and the latter with Volkswagen’s seven-speed direct-shift gearbox (or Direktschaltgetriebe, in VW nomenclature).

Related Story. The New and Improved Volkswagen Tiguan. light

Perhaps the most exciting part of this whole soporific exercise is that the Taos is sure to be an affordable option for anybody looking for a relatively practical compact people-hauler. It looks to be coming in somewhere near the $20,000 mark, per Jalopnik.

It may be that we eventually become more excited about the crossover SUV boom. However, today is not that day. Perhaps, VW, if you’re listening – a Taos with the turbocharged 2.0-liter engine from the Golf R? That might wake us up.

Home/Cars