WATCH: VW’s 190 kW Amarok the GTI of bakkies

The 165 kW version of Volkswagen’s Amarok was already the fastest production bakkie in South Africa. It’s a no-brainer that it will relinquish its crown to the newly-launched 190 kW version.

After being rolled out locally in December, we finally got our hands on a test unit this week to put through its paces at Gerotek Testing Facilities. Once Road Test Editor Mark Jones has crunched all the numbers, The Citizen will bring you a detailed breakdown of just exactly what this new bad boy is capable of.

The number to beat in order to become the fastest bakkie The Citizen has ever tested is 8.67 sec, which was set by the 165 kW Amarok back in 2017. At launch, Volkswagen claimed a time of eight seconds.

Wolfsburg has now claimed that the 190 kW Amarok will get to 100 km/h from a standstill in 7.6 sec, so we reckon that it will do well to threaten the eight-second barrier. This in itself would be quite an achievement for a bakkie, something which is primarily built to carry a load of cargo.

In 2005, the Golf V GTI just managed to sneak in under eight seconds in a time of 7.98 sec. A few years later, the Honda Type R failed to crack eight seconds when the best Mark could record in it was 8.15 sec.

If you had told the performance engineers over at Honda at the time that 14 years later a production double cab bakkie might threaten this sprint time, they might have surely considered resigning on the spot!

Powered by a 3.0-litre V6 TDI engine, an overboost function allows the Amarok an output of 200 kW for up to 10 seconds to assist during overtaking. The 580 Nm of torque between 1 400 and 2 750 rpm is sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed Tiptronic transmission.

All this testosterone comes at a price though, with our test model in Extreme guise carrying a price tag of R996 000.

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