ATLAS CROSS SPORT DRIVERS

By comparison, the Atlas Cross Sport has two-rows and seats five, although it is more athletic and sporty in appearance. R-Line gives you additional badging and unique bumpers, a leather steering wheel and stainless steel caps on the pedals.Īndy Stonehouse’s column “Mountain Wheels” publishes Saturdays in the Summit Daily News. The Atlas is VW’s first swing at a three-row, seven-seater SUV. Most surfaces are nice enough, but the molded plastic in the doors is very, very plasticky indeed. With bulky looks outside, the indoors are perhaps a little plain, though it turned out mine had blue seats and blue door inserts, with every other possible surface a variation of black on black. Starting MSRP of 32,775 for a 2022 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport SE 2.0L TSI with 8-speed automatic transmission. The infotainment system also completely locks you out of adjustments as simple as trying to scan for a radio station while you’re driving, which was as fun as the entire system crashing and restarting. The fully digital dash is nice, however, and infotainment still requires some training, as … well, I couldn’t naturally intuit it, once again. I have to truthfully report a total electronic failure of my navigation system on my drive home, and I repeatedly had issues waiting as the system tried to connect to Apple CarPlay. I believe that Cross Sport may be a bit too tightly tuned for some drivers. My ride quality varied greatly, with pretty manageable work on the Keystone shooting range road, solid and sticky cornering on Loveland Pass and occasional terror on Interstate 70. There were also no shift paddles, so I had to use the actual shift knob to reel in the speed on my downhill trips. Messing with the sport mode, an additional on-road mode contained within the “active control” knob, helped a bit in that regard. Volkswagen also offers a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine with 235 horsepower, and for life at elevation, that might be the better route, as the 3.6-liter really, really needs to be coaxed to put everything out in thin air.

It’s got an eight-speed automatic transmission and, in non-icy conditions, all that power was going to the front wheels. Power is prodigious, when it wants to be, with the 276-horsepower, 3.6-liter VR6 often chirping the tires as I took off, like pretty much all the time. The base model of the 2023 Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport has an MSRP of 35,205, but the average price paid is 35,309 based on 29 transactions from the past 4 weeks. It eats up an entire parking spot, and parked next to a 20-year-old Jetta, it looks like a school bus.

ATLAS CROSS SPORT DRIVERS

There’s bigness all around I cannot imagine how European drivers would react to this Tennessee-built machine. That space means an ultra-roomy interior, with so much rear passenger foot room you could literally sleep on the floor, and the rear cargo space is so robust it seems you might be able to fit a canoe inside.Īnd some of the spaces in the vehicle just seem to have been designed for spaciousness’s sake, including the carpeted console box.

Atlas cross sport