The Wagon Trail US road trip with a difference

That we went from the San Fernando Valley to some of nature’s most astounding sights at the Grand Canyon National Park and the Death Valley with a stopover to get dazzled by the glitz of Las Vegas wasn’t the highlight of our drive but the two cars that we took on this journey definitely were – because these were the only two Volkswagen Taigun SUVs in the whole of the US of A. Or rather in the whole of North America or actually in either of the Americas. Infact, these were the only two Volkswagen Taiguns on the roads outside of India. Yogendra Pratap was behind the wheel of one of the SUVs and is back to tell the tale

- Yogendra Pratap

We began our journey with the Taiguns from Pasadena, a northern suburb of Los Angeles, where the cars had been shipped all the way from India to be part of the World Car Award’s #LATestFest, an annual event where jury members from around the world gather at the time of the LA Auto Show to usually drive cars that are not available in their markets. For the Taigun, that meant all the jury members except for the six from India. As export versions of the Taigun were not being produced yet, the jurors got to drive the India-spec versions of the SUV and that meant that the steering wheels were on the wrong side of the cars – on the right for India as opposed to being on the left for the US as well as all other countries where they drive on the right side of the road. Both the SUVs were the top-of-the-line versions of the two lines that VW has on sale in India – the Dynamic Line and the Performance Line, the first being with the 1-litre TSI engine and the other being with the 1.5-litre TSI EVO engine. While the Dynamic Line SUV was Wild Cherry Red with the engine mated to a 6-speed manual transmission, the Curcuma Yellow Performance Line SUV had a 7-speed DSG gearbox. Now this was a double whammy for global automotive journalists as not only were most of them driving with the steering wheels on the opposite side of what they were used to but many of them were not used to driving stick-shifts, and that too with the gear shift lever falling on the wrong hand. Thankfully, the cars came through the ordeal unscathed despite our worries and all the jury members I spoke with only had positive things to say about both the cars.