Don’t Overlook the 2024 VW Arteon Before It’s Gone (POV Drive Review)

Yes, it has its limits, but as long as you're aware of those and work around them, you'd have a lot of fun. And who doesn't love a good underdog? Come on. Hey crew, I've got the key to that 24 Volkswagen Arteon SCL Premium R-Line. What a mouthful. We are going to take it for a drive, but first let's check out how it looks on the inside and outside. 24 is the final model year of the Arteon before it's replaced by the all-electric production version of the ID Aero. With that happening, no changes for this model year. Up front is still that gaping grille with lots of chrome slats and an LED light bar connecting the two projector LED headlights with LED DRLs and turn signals. This one is painted in King's Red Metallic. It's got a sumptuous metallic flake on the paint surface. Not always into red, but I definitely am on this car. At the side, this range topper gets two-tone 20-inch alloy wheels wrapped in Continental Pro Contact All-Season tires, two 45 section fronts and rear. At the side, the Arteon shows off the smooth slope of its roofline and chrome details for the window trim and lower sills. One interesting note about the wheel arches is that when viewed overhead, they just look sheared off completely. And around the back is a black lip spoiler, above the Volkswagen logo that also functions as the trunk release. There are thin LED taillights and turn signals, above chrome accenting for the lower bumper and the two fake exhaust ports. Yeah, the real exhausts are found underneath the bumper. Apart from that disappointment, the Arteon is far and away one of the most interesting and coolest looking cars on the road today and I don't even love this 4-door coupe segment, but which do you think looks best? I think it's this. You let me know in the comments and let's check out the interior. Opening up and looking inside at this two-tone Mistral Gray and Raven leather interior. Now from the factory, the SEL Premium trim should have rear heated seats in addition to front heated ventilated seats and a driver's seat massage, but this car only has front heated seats, so it's noted and discounted at the dealership level. On the doors, there's injection molding, we've got leatherette, more injection molding for your armrest, hard plastics down low, an upgraded Harman Kardon sound system and one-touch up-down windows. Stepping in is easy to do. Behind my own seats, at six feet tall, I've got plenty of knee room. The seat back's all in leather. There is a map pocket, big foot pockets to slide your feet under and excellent thigh support. Headroom is not so good of a story, so my head is pressed against the roof. I can't make it back to the headrest. It's going to be a thumbs down situation for me. In the middle are air vents. You've got a third zone of climate. At this trim level, lift this up for a DC outlet and USB-C port. The draft shaft up isn't too big of an obstacle, so I can make it into the middle seat, but headroom here is an even bigger issue, so hopefully your rear passengers are more legs than torso. If you don't have a middle passenger, there is an armrest that comes down with leather padding and two or is it three cupholders? Not quite sure. Let's check out the front next. Door close noise with these frameless windows is still pretty solid. There's a little rattle to it, not bad. Smart keyless entries for the rear and front doors. The front seats, as I mentioned, are heated only. There is a large sunroof that they call panoramic. I disagree. Three positions of memory for the driver's seat. 12-way power adjustments for both front passengers. Aluminum accented foot pedals. The front door trim looks almost identical to the back. They just add this piece of fake carbon fiber. You get power adjusting and power folding door mirrors and a lift back release. Highly practical design. Very easy to load and unload cargo in here. There's 27 cubic feet of space. If you need more room, though, you can go around to the rear doors, pull on the tabs, and get the seats down 60-40. Yeah, it would be nice if they had levers to pull to get those rear seats folded from back here, but I am impressed that they managed to fit a full-size spare tire underneath the floor. There is a power close, not power close, and lock function on that lift back. Hopping in the driver's seat now and throwing it in accessory mode to turn on the digital gauge cluster that is reconfigurable when you hit this view button here. There is no head-up display, stitched leatherette up on the dashboard, more of that fake carbon fiber trim, and then an 8-inch touchscreen infotainment system that retains the volume knob and tuner. Love that. The screen itself is not the most responsive or vivid, but it does have wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Beneath the screen are your climate controls, which are all touch-sensitive and kind of frustrating at that. Like, why do I need a slider for my fan speed? That can be a bit distracting while driving. Move this forward for a wireless charging pad. They kept the gloss black to a minimum here, and I appreciate that. Leather wraps around the gear selector. Pull this back to reveal two cup holders under the leatherette-top console. We have just a little bit of storage with two USB-C ports. The steering wheel is leather-wrapped and heated with perforated sport grips at 9 and 3. That feels excellent. The paddles in the back of the wheel, those feel kind of cheap, and I don't like the touch controls on the wheel. They're clustered very closely together, and the first touch doesn't always work with those. Visibility is good, except for that seat pillar. A little bit of a blind spot, but there is standard blind spot monitoring with rear cross traffic. At just under $52,000 as tested, this cabin doesn't have nearly the same wow factor as the exterior. Now, we are missing some things that should be on this car, but it still feels like it falls a little short. Let's see if it can make that up with the drive, though. All right, let's fire it up, and just like that, the Arteon is on. You know, I didn't mention one thing from the interior impressions. I said these controls in the steering wheel are bothersome and the touch-sensitive climate things, but really what triggers my OCD is the fact that the volume knob has the power icon on it that rotates with the volume dial, so only when the volume is completely off is it perfectly upright. Why is that not independently always upright, and even still, it's kind of a little off. Sorry, getting crazy here, but that's annoying. Hello, cabin crew. Thank you for joining me for this drive in the 24 Volkswagen Arteon, and after that OCD demonstration, you're probably about done, but we should start our drive. So, we're going to go into the mode, and we'll begin as we do here at Myles Brouwer in comfort. We've got eco, comfort, normal, sport, and custom. Back into reverse brings up a kind of medium to low resolution camera. Why is it all like distorted at the fringes? It's like trying to do wide angle, but it's going for the fish eye. You do have a surround view view. Surround view, yeah, and that's helpful, and trajectory lines for you. Down into drive, and we'll kick things off with a turning radius test. Wheel cranked. You know, for all-wheel drive, that's not all that bad. Turn signal sound now. It's fine. That's fine. World famous horn test. Oh, it's sharp. That's, that sounds like a train horn, like a small train horn, but either way, that isn't good. The powertrain in the 24 Arteon is a two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder that makes 300 horsepower and 295 pound-feet of torque. It is routed through a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox, and sent to your choice of just the front tires or all four tires, depending on your trim. The entry-level trim is front drive. The mid and high tier are all-wheel drive, and for a dual-clutch, it's a very smooth transmission, only at the very end of your braking, or very beginning of your acceleration, as it's going from second to first, or first to second, depending. Do you get a little bit of a rocking in the car, but otherwise, it's just buttery. Wonderful transmission, and here in the comfort drive mode, throttle response is relaxed, but not dead, and if you go into the normal drive mode, it perks up appreciably. It is a traditional single turbo system, and so you are waiting a little bit for the boost to build if you really need to make a pass in normal, or comfort, or sport. It's going to be the same experience. You dig into the throttle, and you kind of just wait a few seconds until you get past 2,500 or 3,000 RPM, when boost really comes into play, but this car just suits daily driving extremely well, and the ride quality from these standard adaptive dampers, which are here even on the entry-level version of the Arteon, provide this suppleness, and this composure, this compliance, making your daily commute so pleasant, and there is still a little bit of a fun factor with a single turbo engine. When you get that boost to come on, just get that surge, the G-Force pushes you back a little more into your seat. The brakes are so easy to modulate. It doesn't take any effort to really have a very smooth stop, and as the speeds pick up, the cabin stays really nice and quiet. It sort of betrays the Volkswagen logo on the exterior of the Arteon, where you might presume that it's going to be a mainstream, kind of loud driving experience. This feels more on the entry-level luxury side of things, which I suppose matches the price point for this car, but I'm going to quiet up now, and we'll listen for the NPH level at these speeds. Man, this is all but entirely serene. You get a little tire hum, the wind noise is very low, the powertrain, only when you dig into the throttle do you hear a little meek murmur from the turbo four-cylinder. If you go over certain bumps, some of that noise enters the cabin. We'll demonstrate here, but it's so, so good. Very impressed with the Arteon in this environment, but now you get to see how it does in a more dynamic one. Okay, now it's time to move into the sport drive mode, which is also going to put us in the sport transmission response, and you could just do that independently by pulling back on the gear selector, which is so very satisfying, by the way. This mechanical selector compared to buttons or touch icons that we've got on so many new vehicles, this just gives you that sense of satisfaction. It's nostalgia getting off track. Okay, just going to put my foot down now. Slight delay as we waited for the turbocharger to spool up and the gearbox to click down a gear or two, but then that 300 horsepower comes into play, and you do have the passing power you're looking for in a sporty sedan like this one. Now, I feel it necessary to clarify that with a curb weight bordering on 4,000 pounds in the Arteon, this powertrain with 300 horses doesn't pack the same kind of punch that this does with 315 horses in something lighter like the Volkswagen Golf R. It still has no trouble getting out of its own way, but it's just not going to set your hair on fire. I do want to try out manual mode, so I'm going to move the selector over to the right to lock us in there. I'll utilize these paddles, which do prompt quick shifts. Thank you, dual clutch. Yeah, that actually is much more enjoyable than I expected. Leave it to a good gearbox to excite the drive. Wish the paddles had a little more authority than these tiny plasticky things, but the crispness of the shifts themselves are wonderful. Now, we have yet to see how quick the Arteon can dig itself out of the hole on the way to 60, so we've got our real world zero to 60 test up next. With my race box set up here to record, I am going to put the stability control system into sports, which will enable launch control. Yes, the Arteon has launch control. Holding my foot on the brake, pinning the throttle, building up the revs, and letting it go. There's 60 in 5.17 seconds. All righty then. That's that all-wheel drive and torque vectoring system showing off, and independent tests have seen as quick as 4.7 seconds to 60 for the Arteon. What about the handling, though? Stabbing on those brakes, Continental All Seasons seem very much out of their element here. The pedal felt firm enough. The turn in, nice and sharp with those large diameter wheels, there is an impression of stability transmuted by this steering, which, while light, does have great sensitivity just off center to communicate the grip levels, or lack thereof. Then the car does get to hustling in a straight line. You'll want to be early to that brake pedal because of the tires, and then when you are hard on the brakes, the nose wiggles a touch. The suspension clearly not being tuned for max attack aggression. Complete flatness through curves. And while the all-wheel drive system is front biased, you can send up to 50% of available torque to the rear tires, and then 100% of that to just one tire, and that kind of overdrives the outside wheel and mitigates understeer very well. So it's almost like, in spite of its suspension tuning for comfort, and in spite of its very modest tire compound, the Arteon is entertaining to drive. Yes, it has its limits, but as long as you're aware of those and work around them, you'd have a lot of fun. And who doesn't love a good underdog? Come on. And while I wouldn't hesitate to put on a better set of summer tires to really extract more from the Arteon, I would check myself before I mess with the suspension because it's calibrated so well for daily driving excellence that it would be a shame to compromise that. And that's going to lead into my miles per hour word of the day, which for the 24 Volkswagen Arteon is debonair, meaning confident, stylish, charming even. And I do need to restrict those words to the design of the exterior and to the driving dynamics because this interior is altogether underwhelming. It doesn't really match those two other details, but when talking about the design, when talking about the drive, they're both so very good. And those do warrant the price point. And those do make you feel more confident, feel more debonair and appear to all other people to be a more interesting individual. Just ahead of our pricing discussion, let's review the top speed and fuel economy. Top speed for the Arteon is 128 miles per hour and the fuel economy is 22 mpg in the city, 30 on the highway and 25 combined. The starting price for the entry-level SE grade is around $44,000. But this vehicle, as tested in SEL premium trim with the king's red metallic paint is a hair or two under 52,000 buckaroos. Competitors in this pseudo luxury sport four-door segment include the Acura TLX A-Spec that starts at $50,000 and makes 272 horsepower, gets to 60 in six seconds and has fuel economy of 24 combined. There is the Volvo S60 Recharge that starts around $53,000, makes 400 horsepower, gets to 60 in 4.3 seconds and because it's a plug-in hybrid has excellent fuel economy of 74 combined mpg or mpg equivalent. And finally we have the Audi A5 Sportback. I'd look at the premium plus trim to rival this SEL premium version of the Arteon and that would start at about $51,000, makes 262 horsepower, it gets to 60 in 5.1 seconds and has fuel economy of 27 combined mpg. Before I reach a verdict I do want to play around with the travel assist system of driving aids including adaptive cruise control and steering assistance. It's not really a hands-free system, I'm just demonstrating how it stays in the center of a lane even on a doing quite well. Really solid. Nice to have those features and they are standard on this trim level. Though I don't think this trim level is actually the best version of the Arteon, not the highest value proposition because knowing what you get in the interior at this range-topping trim and not being impressed by it, I would rather save a little money and still get the exterior design, still get the all-wheel drive system, still get this great powertrain in the SEL trim, not the SEL premium but the $48,000 mid-level SEL trim. That is a much more compelling argument against its competitors where still I do think the Acura TLX A-Spec is more engaging to drive and I do think that the comfort factor and the ride compliance of the Volvo S60 and the Audi A5 are really tied with this vehicle. It doesn't really excel above those. I still think that on looks alone and having a great daily driving experience and having the ability to, with the right tires, have a little bit of fun behind the wheel, this car is a really compelling option and I am going to miss it when it's discontinued next year. I just don't think anything looks like this on the road and I don't think the next wave of Volkswagen's all-electric ID, whatever you want to call it, are going to have the same charm. What do you guys think? Which would you choose? Would you have the Volkswagen Arteon? Would you have the Acura TLX A-Spec? Would you get the Audi A5 Sportback? Or would you choose that Volvo S60 with its incredibly comfortable chair? That's a big win for that one. Let me know in the comments. I hope you guys have enjoyed this POV Drive Review. If you did, please like, comment, and share it. Subscribe to the channel, hit that bell to get notified, and I'll see you again next time!