Mekanik@abufaris.com

If, like JEREMY MAHADEVAN, you’ve ever thought of the billboards by the side of the North-South Expressway as a problem in need of a solution, then the Volkswagen Touareg is the car for you. No, really.

Colourful but luxurious anyway.

YOU’VE probably seen the billboards that line the North-South Expressway. Or, well, you probably haven’t, since like any upstanding citizen your eyes are always on the road and not, say, the accident on the other side, or the contents of your passenger’s shirt.

Well, allow me to tell you about these billboards, then. They appear on every raised or otherwise prominent piece of ground, and they all advertise tyres, car batteries or biscuits. Tyre and battery ads are easily explained — when you’re stuck on the verge, either item having gone flat, these are cruel reminders that you might want to try a different brand next time.

The biscuit ads are far more curious. Since drivers on the move can’t pay any attention to them, they must be aimed at people who can — namely, passengers.

See, being a passenger on the North-South Expressway is about as interesting as a round-the-world holiday in a silk-upholstered private jet with radio deejay Ross Yusof for company; that is, not in the least. So maybe these biscuit hoardings are targeted at the entertainment-starved hordes of car passengers dozing and fidgeting their way up and down the peninsula.
I mean, after you’ve stared at the “scenery” all the way from Nilai to Simpang Renggam, a digestive biscuit is going to seem like the most enthralling thing since someone first pointed out that Ross Yusof will eventually retire.

This is clearly bad news for drivers, particularly if your passengers are children; bored people who stare at biscuit ads are going to want biscuits, and you really don’t want to be bugged every few kilometres to stop and get some; furthermore, biscuits leave crumbs all over your car.

So how do we solve this? Well, one way would be to allow drivers to pay more attention to their passengers. But in order to free up vital attention for stimulating conversation, we need a vehicle that isn’t difficult to drive — something which is less of a chore than everything else. So what we need is some sort of SUV.

By now, we all know why people want SUVs. It’s a simple function of dimensions — raise the car off the ground, stretch the height, width and length, and you have space and a higher vantage point.

Of course, you lose out on the ground clearance so prized in off-road vehicles, and in some cases you don’t even have space left over for decent four-wheel drive innards, but the days are past when we can expect SUVs to be capable off-road. Space and height are the main points of these devices.

Space allows a car’s occupants to be more relaxed, and height allows the driver to see far ahead of the traffic in front — both will facilitate cordial, thought-provoking interaction between occupants. But you probably need comfort, as well, so people aren’t in a bad mood.

So you can’t really have something like a Nissan X-Trail, which has decent ride quality but no luxury to speak of, or a BMW X3, which has decent luxury but no ride quality to speak of — what you need, my friends, is a Volkswagen Touareg.

The Touareg’s levels of comfort and luxury compare admirably to any of its German competitors, and it’s one of the most relaxing on-road drives I’ve come across. It’s got the right seats, the right driving position, the right silken big-cat V6, the right build quality — everything you need to create that bubble of security which allows the driver to concentrate more on her passengers.

Sure, it doesn’t have the dynamics and grunt of the BMW X5 or Porsche Cayenne, but it’s a hugely impressive off-road performer. There’s a reason why the first winner of the DARPA Challenge, a race featuring robot cars competing to cross an American desert, was an android Touareg named Stanley — this car can hold its own (literally, it seems) in the mucky-muck.

Why is this critical to the driver-passenger relationship, you ask? Well, it provides that crucial ingredient of conversation — a topic.

Once done ridiculing Ross Yusof, the driver can always throw a knowing, sidelong glance at the passenger and say, “You know, this thing is pretty impressive off-road, despite appearances…”

The Touareg has undergone a mild facelift and gained a more powerful 3.6-litre powerplant since the last we tested it; apart from that not much has noticeably changed, but it remains an attractive proposition and one of our favourite SUVs. There are a few niggles, such as the storage pack that VW Malaysia specifies, which comes with one or two worthless items (ski bag, anyone?).

Also, you have to swallow the higher price tag (RM433,888) and lower spec, as compared to the version once brought in under dubious circumstances by importers Wald. But this is the Touareg as VW means you to have it, fully supported by it.

The only big problem with it will arise when you find yourself driving alone on the North-South Expressway with nothing but billboards for company. You might find yourself craving digestive biscuits.