Volkswagen Arteon review - Reliability and safety

It looks thoroughly contemporary from the outside, but there’s plenty of shared engineering under the skin of the Arteon, all of which suggests it shouldn’t provide too many headaches on the reliability front. While the Arteon is too new to appear in our Driver Power satifaction survey, Volkswagen on the whole ranked 5th out of 25 with owners in our 2018 results.

Aside from the shared Passat/MBQ platform, all the Arteon’s engines are established in the VW Group line-up, and the same applies to tech such as the Active Info dash and Discover Nav systems. Some of the more advanced electronics systems are a bit more novel, but many of them are related to safety systems seen elsewhere in the VW range,and we’d hope that the most rigorous test and development regimes have been applied. 

On the safety front, the Arteon has returned excellent results in the Euro NCAP crash tests – including the best pedestrian protection rating in the executive car sector, scoring 85 per cent. Adult occupant and child occupant ratings of 96 per cent and 85 per cent are admirable too, and the Arteon comes with an array of standard-fit safety kit, such as Lane Departure Warning and Brake Assist.

If you want to splash out on the options list, you can add Emergency Assist that stops the car slowly in the left lane should the driver be incapacitated, while front, rear and side cameras, a head-up display and traffic sign recognition are also on the menu.

16

Warranty

The VW Arteon comes with Volkswagen’s standard three-year/60,000-mile warranty. This used to be standard fare, but BMW and Mercedes both offer three years cover with unlimited mileage.

Servicing 

Volkswagen offers fixed or flexible servicing packages for the Arteon, dependent on mileage covered and type of driving undertaken. Annual oil change services (or after 9,300 miles covered) are advised if you go for the fixed option, while this is increased to every two years (18,600 miles) under the flexible option.