Volkswagen Taigun / Skoda Kushaq: Performance over Comfort
I test drove the Taigun and Kushaq (which are petrol crossovers1), for some 75 km, both city and highway, and evaluated them against my requirements.
Skoda is a VW subsidiary, and both cars are essentially the same, with minor variations. Skoda cars tend to be marginally cheaper: Skoda is VW’s entry-level brand.
My conclusion is that the Taigun/Kushaq is only for diehard petrolheads who want the absolute best performance for the price, at the expense of other aspects of a car like comfort and digital features. Most people want a balanced product, and the Taigun/Kushaq is not that. Volkswagen’s philosophy is to focus on the mechanical parts of the car, and while this may have been great a decade back, today, cars are computers on wheels, and I expect them to be more sophisticated.
In product design, if you take one attribute and optimise it to an extreme extent, you’ll have diminishing returns. Imagine a company is selling a laptop that has a 1TB SSD and a bad screen that’s blurry and dim and has washed out colors. If they were to upgrade it by giving it a 2TB SSD, it won’t drive many additional sales, since user needs for storage are already being over-served at 1 TB. On the other hand, if they improved the screen, it would drive many more sales, since it amounts to an improvement along the dimension where user needs were being under-served.
The Taigun/Kushaq accelerates faster than the Creta, but the Creta accelerates fast and effortlessly from 0-100, so further improvement doesn’t make much difference. On the other hand, the Taigun/Kushaq is uncomfortable, and is lacking digital features.
Most people are better off buying the Creta or the Seltos over the Taigun/Kushaq. Among the two, the Creta is slightly more comfortable. The Creta is 100/100, the Seltos is 99/100, and the Taigun/Kushaq is 70/100.
If you want to understand the Taigun/Kushaq’s strengths and weaknesses in detail, continue reading. Here - represents a weakness and +, a strength:
- In the front passenger seat, I can’t stretch my legs comfortably.
- The cabin looks marginally less premium than the Creta.
+ All 4 windows roll down completely.
- The reverse camera doesn’t show indicators that move as you turn the wheel, which show you which path the car will take.
- No front parking sensor. It doesn’t beep as you come close to a wall you’re trying to park in front of, unless you’re reversing.
- No 360-degree camera
- The inner rear view mirror feels cramped.
- No auto hold.
± The car comes with idle start stop, but you should turn it off, since the AC goes off, too.
± You have to press the brake a lot for there to be any effect.
± The engine sound is deep.
+ Everything is sturdy, even the AC vents. I don’t know if it will last long or it’s just a way to fool customers into thinking it will.
+ There are turn indicators on wing mirrors
- In the Kushaq, the goggles holder doesn’t open. This makes me wonder about the quality of Skoda, since it’s a budget brand. I didn’t try this in the Taigun.
Comfort
- When the seat is low, my stomach gets pressed and it becomes uncomfortable. I can fix this by increasing the seat height, but then my head gets close to the windshield header2 and it feels cramped. In better cars like the Creta, my stomach isn’t pressed, and I have good legroom and headroom, all at the same time.
+ The steering wheel doesn’t touch my knee.
- Thigh support isn’t adjustable. In other words, the seat is 6- rather than 8-way electrically adjustable3.
- The suspension is firm. I feel the vibrations of the road through the seat and the steering wheel. It’s tiring, unlike the Creta, which is a cocoon that floats over the road.
- Everything is hard: the cushions are hard, on the steering wheel, center armrest, and everywhere else. It doesn’t feel luxurious. Even the one touch window down on the driver’s side requires a hard press; otherwise it stops midway. I can’t honk with a finger — I have to use my hand and press hard. All this is unnecessary effort with no purpose.
+ Noise isolation is good: I don’t hear too much road noise.
Driving
+ The car is equipped with a superb 7-speed DSG transmission. I was accelerating significantly in 4th gear, and I eased off the throttle, at which point it changed from 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 all in one second.
+ You can see the current gear on the instrument cluster, unlike some other cars that hide this from you. I’m curious and want to see under the hood to understand how a system works.
+ Sport mode is slightly more responsive than Drive and not annoyingly loud. It causes the engine to rev only slightly higher.
Cooling
- The climate control doesn’t work well in auto mode; you either become warm or get blasted by cold air.
- The ventilated seats were ineffective. My back felt humid after an hour 4.
+ The glovebox is chilled.
- No remote AC start.
- No rear window sunshades.
- The sunroof is not panoramic. I’ve found panoramic sunroofs to work excellently in cooling the car instantly when it has been parked for hours in the afternoon summer sun. I don’t know how well a non-panoramic sunroof works.
- You can’t turn the AC on remotely using the app.
+ All four of the AC vents are closable, unlike my Ritz, where the two center ones aren’t.
Safety
+ ESC
+ EBD
+ Brake boosters
+ Side airbags that protect head, chest and stomach
- But not the hip.
- The seat belt doesn’t have a pretensioner or a force limiter
+ DRLs
+ Auto headlamps (LED projector)
- No ADAS, like blind spot monitoring or lane assistance.
- No lane keeping
- To adjust the volume, or end a call, or adjust the AC, you have to use the touchscreen. As with touchscreens, your press often doesn’t work, and you have to try again. There are no physical knobs or buttons. This is dangerous.
+ Emergency brake assist
+ Multi-collision braking. This is where if your vehicle collides with another, the car automatically applies the brake so that your car doesn’t hit a third car. VW and Skoda are among the few cars available in India that have this feature.
+ TPMS5
Digital features
+ 2 USB-C ports
+ 12V
- Wireless charging didn’t work. It asked me to remove obstructions (there were none) and dust (taking the phone out of the case and wiping both the phone and the charging pad didn’t make this error message to go away) 6.
+ CarPlay works wired
- The car comes with an in-house audio system, which when playing music is worse than the Creta’s Bose premium 8-speaker music system.
- The infotainment screen is supposedly 10 inches, but it’s very low height and so feels cramped. When using Google Maps, I want to see what’s down the road, which requires more height. Width doesn’t help — it shows me what’s far away from my path, which is irrelevant. The Basalt’s screen is so low height that I might as well use my phone screen. That way, I don’t have the downsides of CarPlay, like being unable to pinch to zoom out and see the route. The screen fails at its primary job. This is with the Kushaq; I don’t remember if this was the case on the Taigun.
Front passenger seat
Here are some notes about the experience in the front passenger seat7.
+ The same 6-way electrical adjustment as the driver.
- I can’t stretch my legs comfortably.
Rear seat
Here are some notes about riding in the rear seat8.
- Can’t stretch legs fully
- My head is close to the roof
- Can’t recline
- The headrest isn’t plush (but it isn’t in most cars)
+ 2 USB-C ports
+ Dual AC vents that can be adjusted up/down/left/right
+ Rear windows roll down fully
+ My head was near the rear end of the window, so the window felt panoramic horizontally. The window height is fine but it doesn’t feel expansive.
- I felt vibrations in the rear seat, too.
The 2 variants
The Taigun/Kushaq comes in two versions, both turbocharged:
1.5 liter 4-cylinder engine with DSG9
1 liter 3-cylinder with with a torque converter
I test drove both, and if you buy a Taigun/Kushaq, buy the 1.5. The 1 is not good:
- It’s unresponsive even in Sport mode: you need to press the accelerator a lot, then wait for a long time, and then it will accelerate but not fast. When you release the accelerator, you sometimes get a surge forward or a slight jerk backward.
- Gear shifts are not as smooth as CVT or DCT.
- When the light turns green and you let go of the brake, it surges forward, even without pressing the accelerator. This is in D mode, not just S. To fix this, you have to let go of the brake gently.
So, if you buy a Taigun/Kushaq, buy the 1.5.
Buy the Taigun/Kushaq only if you care about performance to the exclusion of comfort, conveniences and digital features.
They’re monocoque / unibody.
The horizontal bar above the windshield.
Both the driver and front passenger seats are electrically adjustable, which is more than most cars offer.
This was in the Taigun; I don’t remember about the Kushaq.
… in the Kushaq. I don’t remember about the Taigun.
This was in the Taigun; I didn’t try it out in the Kushaq
This section comes from my notes about the Kushaq.
This section comes from my notes about the Kushaq.
VW’s term for DCT.