I’m Genuinely Surprised How Much I Liked The 2025 Volkswagen Taos, A Car Refreshingly Free Of BS

I’m going to be honest with you: I didn’t really think I was going to give this car a decent review. It’s not because I’m actually hostile to Volkswagen or anything like that, but more that I just didn’t think I cared. And not just a normal sort of not caring, more like the kind of aggressive non-caring a petulant child feels while stuck in a long-term records storage facility where the only screen available was playing 1980s reruns of The McLaughlin Group, nonstop. I mean like a collapse on the floor and writhe around screaming “I DON’T CAAAAAARRRRRREEEEEE” sort of apathy. That was my attitude towards the Taos.

The reason for this is that I saw the Taos as the most baseline, default sort of vehicle you can get in America right now, a compact SUV with a four-cylinder inline turbo engine, four doors, four tires on wheels that are too big, and paradoxically overdone yet wildly forgettable styling. To make matters worse, the Taos was just part of the SUV/Crossover core of Volkswagen’s lineup, which seems to just be the same basic vehicle in a few barely variable sizes, with some minor styling and pricing differences.

I mean, look:

That’s just three sizes of SUV that are all sort of interchangeable styling-wise, and one electric version. It feels pretty sterile when you compare it with the freewheeling madness that was VW about a half-century earlier:

Of course, if you dig deeper, all the cars in that picture above share one of just three engine types. Still, it’s hard to ignore how much more character VW used to have, especially from a styling standpoint.

But that’s not really a fair criticism to VW; this is just modernity, and there’s no question that modern cars are vastly more efficient and safe and fast and comfortable and all that, even if they do seem to lack a good bit of charm. But the point is, I wasn’t pre-disposed to be particularly welcoming to the Taos.

But you know what happened? I ended up really liking the Taos! I didn’t want to, but it just kind of happened! And there were two extremely simple and basic things that broke through my car-snobby resolve to get me to appreciate this compact SUV on its own merits.

Cheap And Colorful

Those two things were, sort of metaphorically, both green. First, there was the color, which was a bright and bold shade of tree-frog green, and that caught my attention. I’m so deeply, powerfully sick of monochrome grayscale cars, that seeing something in such a vivid and unashamed color just felt good. The Taos’ color palette isn’t huge, but there are at least two good, real colors in there:

That green and that blue are both fantastic colors that the Taos looks great in. I hope nobody orders any of the gray ones, ever.

The other green thing was the more metaphorical one, green as in money, because the Taos is cheap. Well, cheap by modern standards, and yeah, the price tends to go up pretty quickly as you start adding stuff, but it’s worth noting that the Taos does start under $25,000. The one I tested – a pretty loaded Taos SEL 4MOTION one – comes in at around $36,000 or so, which isn’t that cheap anymore, but is still a hell of a lot less than the average price of a new car was in 2024, which was almost $48,000.

So, it’s a good color, and it’s not crazy expensive. That’s a pretty good start. But there’s really one overarching thing I discovered about my experience with this car that endeared it to me:

It’s Remarkably Free Of Bullshit

That’s right! This is a car that, compared to a lot of the new cars I’ve driven recently, feels incredibly free of modern car bullshit! And that’s odd, because it is most definitely a modern car, with all the modern car stuff, but somehow the whole experience of dealing with this modern car felt easy and pleasant. It’s not a car that really asks much of you, at all. It just does the basic stuff you need a car to do, and it does them pretty well.

Don’t get me wrong, though, there’s still some modern car bullshit to deal with, like the embarrassing insistence on making fake exhaust pipe tips:

…but if you’re using your car properly within about a year those things should be broken completely off thanks to repeatedly smacking into grocery carts to see if you can send them skittering into the cart return corral, like you were a soccer player kicking a penalty shot.

When I say this car is happily free of bullshit some of that has to do with basic dash controls and user interface stuff; after just coming out of a VW ID.Buzz, I was used to things like touch-sensitive volume controls and horribly modal power window switches, so when I got into the Taos and saw window switches like this:

…and volume control knobs and other controls like these:

…the end result was that everything just worked, and worked easily, without really any amount of thought required on my part, which is good, because requiring me to think often ends in disaster.

Sure, I played around with VW’s native UX a bit, noting that it allows for a pretty robust set of off-road instruments that, statistically, precisely zero people who buy this car will ever use or need:

More important than VW’s native UX is that the Taos had wireless Apple CarPlay (Android Auto is available, too) so I just used that, since, like every other living mammal I’ve met, I prefer to just use my phone’s OS for center-stack stuff like music and navigation and podcasts or whatever. Also, and I think this is an important thing to note, the Taos had the best, easiest, most trouble-free wireless charging system I’ve ever used on a modern car.

I’m not kidding – you’d think this should be the same on every car, but for far too many cars I’ve tested over the past couple years, I’ve found the wireless chargers to be finicky, unreliable things. [Ed Note: I totally agree; wireless charging in cars tends to suck! -DT]. A lot of them are just poorly designed or positioned, causing the phone to slide out or get flung to the floor when you’re driving a bit, um, spiritedly, and almost all of them have stopped charging seemingly at random, or if the phone shifts two picometers too far in any direction and the electron shells get misaligned or whatever dark magic is used to make wireless charging happen.

The point is wireless phone charging pads in cars almost always suck. But not the Taos’ charging pad! It just worked, every time, and I didn’t even have to be extra careful about positioning the phone! It just worked, and kept working! I was furtively glancing at it, always expecting it to stop charging and give me some cryptic apology on screen, but that never happened!

Oh, and look at this:

See that little hole up there? That’s right above the charging pad. As I do with any unknown hole I encounter, I shoved some fingers up in there and found it was blowing a steady stream of cold air right at the charging pad. Now, I’m not certain about this just yet (I did reach out to VW for confirmation) but I think this is a special vent designed to keep your phone from overheating on the charger in warm weather, something I’ve seen happen many, many times. That’s brilliant.

This is what I’m talking about: The car isn’t particularly revolutionary or even remarkable at anything, but it just does all the basics very well. Like the cargo area:

There aren’t lots of clever cubbies or ways to configure things, but what you do get is a pretty cavernous space with a fairly rectangular shape. You get about 25 cubic feet of space with the 4MOTION one, and about 28 with the FWD version. Fold the seat down and you have a nice 66 (FWD) or 60 (AWD) cubic feet of volume you can fill with your crap.

And, under the rear floor, look!

An actual spare tire! This is becoming less and less common, but I still like knowing that they’re not extinct yet.

In a lot of ways, the Taos just reminds me of what a Golf once was: a general-use, do-whatever car. Fit people, fit some stuff, move them around, don’t fall apart, make driving at least a little engaging, and boom, that’s all you need. The Taos feels pretty much like that, just with some silly SUV-ification slapped onto it, because, you know, it’s the style of the time, like an onion on your belt.

What’s It Like Inside?

I’ve always felt that Volkswagen has had a knack for making pleasant interiors. In fact, that’s why I was duped into buying the miserable VW Tiguan I have – the thing has been a sort of nightmare to own, but I’ll be damned if that interior isn’t a pleasant space to be in. The Taos follows this tradition quite well: It’s an airy interior, with a nice mix of light and dark upholstery, and the optional full-length moonroof is a delight.

It has a powered cover that can slide into place, but I don’t see why you’d ever want it unless there was a huge baboon or something laying on its stomach on your roof and you didn’t feel like staring at its genitals any longer. But how often does that happen? Twice a year?

The materials inside are better than you’d expect for an entry-level car, too. Look at these door cards, for example:

It’s a bold, active design with good armrests and a nice deep storage cubby. It doesn’t look or feel cheap at all! And, even better, all those little stitches are real, not those embarrassing molded-in stitches you’d find on an old Chevy Citation or something. Look close and you can see:

The seats are comfortable, too, including at the rear, which has a fold-down armrest with cupholders and a six-foot party sub/ski pass-through and vents and USB ports back there. It’s everything you need, nothing you don’t, and that’s just great.

How Is It To Drive?

I’m told the 2025 version of the Taos has 19 more horses than the previous one, for a total of 174 horsepower, and 185 pound-feet of torque. That’s plenty, especially considering the Taos only weighs about 3,400 or so pounds, which is pretty light by modern standards. The 1.5-liter inline-four turbo engine gives decent acceleration (I’m told it’ll get to 60 mph in about seven seconds), and while I did find the way the (new for this year for the 4MOTION one) 8-speed auto decided to shift a bit peculiar at times, it was generally fine to the point of being, well, forgettable.

I mean that in a good way; the performance of the Taos did what I needed when I wanted it to, and there’s nothing wrong with that! It wasn’t the most memorable driving experience ever, but sometimes, that’s okay! And it fits with the overall character of this car, which is, fundamentally, easy. Undemanding. It’s a tool that gets you and your stuff places, and you barely have to think about it.

Efficiency-wise, the Taos was fine, but that’s about it. I got between 26 and 29 mpg on average, while doing the sort of driving that isn’t particularly troubled with fuel economy. I bet you could squeeze more out of it, just as I’m sure you could get worse.

Some Nice Details And Final Thoughts

The VW Taos isn’t a car filled with Easter eggs or clever gimmicks or anything like that, as much as I love those things sometimes. It’s more of just a good, easy-to-live-with all-rounder sort of car. Sure, that lower grille is kind of huge and silly-looking, but overall I think the car looks pretty good, perhaps in an unremarkable way, but picking one of the bold colors helps a lot there.

It’s just a modern take on a compact-ish wagon, and that’s a great thing to be.

Oh, and the taillights are pretty good, as well! We’re fortunate to be living in an expressive era of taillight design, so we get fun things like the illuminated VW logo:

…and I’m happy to report that the Taos uses amber for the rear indicators:

It may sound a bit absurd to put it like this, but the thing I liked best about the Taos is that it didn’t piss me off. At all! I feel like every car I’ve tested recently has had some wildly annoying detail – touch-screen-based air vent controls or a finicky phone charging mat or being a pain to get in or out of or something like that, and Taos had none of those things!

It was comfortable, easy to maneuver and park, drove well, offered plenty of room for people and stuff, and had controls that were intuitive and easy to use — there was just minimal bullshit associated with this car.

It’s not going to inflame passions or inspire songs or dreams, but for vast numbers of drivers, who cares? That’s fine! They just need a machine to get them and some stuff all over the place, every day, easily. And the Taos can do that.

It’s too new for me to give any kind of informed opinion on how it may age or what maintenance will be like, which is important, but we’ll just have to wait and see. What I can say is that right now, if you are in the market for a not-so-expensive car that will do what you need and not give you urges to put your fist through a touchscreen, I think the Taos is worth a look.

Especially in green.

The Volkswagen ID.Buzz Is Great Except For One Huge Problem

The Honda Odyssey Is The Fastest Car No One Will Ever Guess Is Fast

The GWM Ora GT Proves China Can Make An Excellent Electric Corolla