New Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace vs used Land Rover Discovery Sport: which is best?

New Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace vs used Land Rover Discovery Sport – driving

You’d think that, with a 30bhp advantage over the Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace, the Land Rover Discovery Sport would be much faster, but that simply isn’t the case. Both cars’ 0-62mph times are identical, while the Tiguan Allspace actually has a higher top speed. It also feels the more responsive of the two cars out on the road – the Discovery Sport feels disappointingly sluggish by comparison.

That isn’t the only area of the driving experience where the Tiguan Allspace betters the Discovery Sport, though. It’s also more comfortable, with a ride quality that matches the Discovery Sport’s smooth nature at high speeds, but lacks the lumpy, jarring quality it has around town. True, the Tiguan Allspace doesn’t ride perfectly itself, but it’s the better resolved of the two cars.

The same goes when you try and pitch these cars into a few corners. Both offer plenty of grip and precise steering that make them safe and easy to hustle along, but the Discovery Sport feels less comfortable doing so, its body leaning over more readily than the Tiguan Allspace’s.

New Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace vs used Land Rover Discovery Sport – costs

Our Target Price for the Tiguan Allspace in this form is £29,153. For that sort of money, you can get yourself a two-year-old Discovery Sport TD4 HSE with seven seats; spend a little more, mind you, and you can find one-year-old examples with fewer than 10,000 miles on the clock.

Of course, you’re getting a Tiguan Allspace with a three-year warranty for the same price as a Discovery Sport with only around a year left of its original guarantee. That said, if you buy your Discovery Sport from a Land Rover dealer under the company’s Approved scheme, something you can afford to do at this price, you do at least get a two-year used car warranty thrown in, not to mention two years’ full UK and European breakdown cover. You’ll only get a year’s worth of similar breakdown cover on the Tiguan Allspace.

Having said that, the Land Rover is the car more likely to require you to make use of that breakdown cover. Its lowly score in our latest Reliability Survey of just 74.7% is fairly poor, and doesn’t compare well with the very respectable 91.8% achieved in the same survey by the Volkswagen Tiguan (we don’t have specific data for the Tiguan Allspace itself, but its results will be included within those of its stablemate).

The Discovery Sport will be by far the more expensive of the two cars to fuel, too. Its 44.1mpg claimed average consumption is deeply unimpressive next to the 56.5mpg of the Tiguan Allspace; that equates to a not-inconsiderable £299 extra in fuel costs over the course of 10,000 miles, at current average fuel prices.

The chances are the Discovery Sport will cost you more to tax, too. Buy one registered before the tax regulations changed on 1 April 2017, and you’ll have to pay £230 a year to tax it – thereafter the cost shrinks to a more reasonable £140 a year, but beware: if there were enough options fitted to tip the list price when the car was new over £40,000 (a distinct possibility given the £38,295 cost of the basic car), that cost rockets to £450 a year. By comparison, the Tiguan Allspace will only set you back £140 a year to tax, unless you specify a tonne of options to take it over that £40,000 threshold.

There is one area in which the Discovery Sport will cost you less, though, and that’s depreciation. Not only does it hold its value particularly well for an SUV, but at two years old, it will have lost a big chunk of its value already. That means the curve from here on in will be substantially shallower than it will be for the Tiguan, which, if you’re buying brand new, has yet to suffer from its steep first-year slide in value.

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