VW Amarok

This is Volkswagen first venture into the pick-up world. You’ll probably send us back to the drawing reading board now, telling us that this is not true. However, we are referring to the first proper pick-up. You see, Volkswagen has had other attempts to create such a vehicle over the years, but none of them offered the full bouquet of assets required from a true workhorse. Want an example? Back in 1980, the automaker started playing with the platform of the Golf Mk1 and one of the results was the Caddy, which was known as Rabbit in North America. Long story short, the Amarok’s picture has no background. It’s just the new, shiny car, captured on camera over a blank setting. However, as the newcomer belongs to the VW Group, it has a lot to inherit. Just think about a mix between the experience VW’s Commercial Vehicles arm has in building a chassis, Audi’s four-wheel drive expertise (don’t take this 100 percent literally) and the Group’s reputation of building reliable vehicles. But will this be enough for the Amarok to survive in a world where the Toyota Hilux makes the rules and where many other competitors come with hard years of doing every possible job in the world, all over the Globe? As you imagine, the Amarok wants to do much more than just “survive”, so it has a mammoth task on its veiny hands. Not only because of the competition, but also due to the fact that the contemporary automotive customer, regardless of the segment the vehicle they’re after belongs to. All that analyzing threatened to run into a tornado of thoughts, so we realized that it was better to get to work ourselves: we took the Double Cab version of the Amarok, fitted with VW’s four-wheel-drive system, 4Motion, for a test drive. As the sun was rising in the morning of the first day, our editors put their lumberjack clothing on, added a few pairs of aviator sunglasses and went for it. Let’s see how it all went.