Volkswagen Arteon Shooting Brake Review 2024

If you want a car that’s stylish and practical, but you can’t face being one of the legions of family car buyers who opt for an SUV, then the Arteon Shooting Brake could be a very neat solution. It has bags of interior space and practicality, and it looks stylish in a refreshingly unique kind of way. It also delivers impressive quality, lots of standard equipment and a good range of choice when it comes to powertrains. It’s comfortable and refined to drive, too.

There aren’t many direct rivals to the Volkswagen Arteon Shooting Brake. Not many car companies offer a Shooting Brake body style, preferring instead to either double-down on ultimate practicality with a conventional estate body, or focus on style and compactness with a hatchback shape.

Mercedes offers the CLA Shooting Brake, while the Kia ProCeed also has a Shooting Brake shape, but both are smaller than the Arteon. There’s the Jaguar XF Sportbrake, which hijacks part of the name, but the shape of the car is more conventional estate car than proper Shooting Brake. The most direct rivals are compact executive estate cars in the shape of the Audi A4 Avant, BMW 3 Series Touring and the Mercedes C-Class Estate.

On the face of it, the Arteon’s interior looks very pleasant indeed. The materials used are of a generally high standard throughout, and there are a variety of jazzy trim inserts to liven up the cabin a little further.

Compare it with your average family estate car, and the Arteon is head-and-shoulders above for the feeling of poshness it delivers. However, when Volkswagen pitches the car at premium competition from the likes of Audi, BMW and Mercedes, the standards are rather higher. In truth, it trails those rivals in terms of how substantial it feels, but it certainly doesn’t feel disgraced in such illustrious company.

All versions of the Shooting Brake get the same basic infotainment system as standard. This takes the form of an 8.0-inch central touchscreen that operates a wide variety of functions, including Bluetooth phone connectivity, DAB, navigation, wireless Apple CarPlay and wired Android Auto. On top of early SE Nav cars, Elegance and R-Line cars also added voice control activation.

The touchscreen looks a bit small by the latest standards, but as it’s running VW’s older software it’s not as glitchy or as convoluted as the company’s latest infotainment efforts, and it’s actually a doddle to use. It also looks great and is quick to respond to prods. You can optionally upgrade the system to a bigger 9.2-inch screen, and this works just as well. There’s another optional infotainment upgrade, which replaces the standard stereo’s eight speakers with a ten-speaker Harman Kardon sound system, complete with 16-channel digital amplifier and 700W output.

All versions get a 10.25-inch digital driver’s display behind the steering wheel. This looks good and works well, not least because it can be configured in a variety of ways.

As a Shooting Brake rather than a traditional estate car, you might expect the Arteon to offer more loadspace than your average family car, but also that some concession in overall practicality will be made in the pursuit of style. If so, you might be pleasantly surprised on that score: the 590-litre loadbay is very competitive with those of many similarly-sized estate cars, and it’s actually bigger than you get in the (much pricier) BMW 5 Series Touring.

The large boot opening makes the space easy to access, but things aren’t entirely perfect. The boot lip doesn’t quite sit flush with the boot floor, so you’ll have to lift items over it and drop them in on the other side. The rear seats fold in a 60/40 split, rather than the more versatile 40/20/40 layout employed by some rivals, and the seatbacks lie at an angle, meaning that half your loadbay is sloped rather than flat. Bear in mind, too, that if you go for the plug-in hybrid version, your boot space will drop very significantly to just 455 litres because of the batteries stored under the boot floor.

Whichever version you go for, though, you get plenty of space inside. It’ll come as no surprise that the front seats have room to spare, but the back seats might well surprise you with how roomy they are. There’s absolutely loads of rear legroom, and there’s also very generous headroom despite the car’s swoopy roofline.

Various engine options have come and gone during the Arteon Shooting Brake’s time on sale, so we’ll look at these as a whole. The most modest offering is a turbocharged 1.5-litre petrol with 150PS, mated to a six-speed manual gearbox. It’s reasonably perky and performance is strong enough with the car lightly loaded, but on those occasions when you carry lots of people and stuff – which is kind of the point of an estate car – it does begin to struggle a bit.

The 2.0-litre TSI petrol is a good bit stronger with 190PS, and feels a little more sprightly as a result, and its seven-speed dual-clutch DSG automatic gearbox swaps cogs smoothly and efficiently.

Two 2.0-litre diesels were also offered, one with 150PS and a six-speed manual gearbox (although the seven-speed DSG was offered as an option) and the other with 200PS, a seven-speed automatic gearbox and a choice of either front- or four-wheel drive. Both coped well with heavy loads, and although the more powerful version was faster against the stopwatch, you couldn’t actually detect all that much difference in performance in day-to-day driving.

The advent of the Shooting Brake in 2020 also brought two new powertrains to the Arteon range. The first of them is a plug-in hybrid that combines a 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol engine with an electric motor to drive the front wheels through a six-speed DSG, giving an all-electric range of 36 miles. It zips along nicely thanks to the electrical urge, and never feels too underpowered.

And then, at the top of the range, sits the R, with its 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol engine that sends 320PS to all four wheels via a seven-speed automatic transmission. This version will crack the 0-62mph dash in just under five seconds, so it’s quick enough to give some pretty exotic machinery quite a nasty surprise away from the lights.

All of the engines in the Arteon range do a good job in this regard. Even the diesels are pretty quiet and smooth compared with the equivalent engines in rivals, while the petrol are a step on still. Charge the hybrid up with electricity on a regular basis to maximise your electric-only running potential, and you’ll have the quietest Arteon of the bunch.

Whichever version you pick, wind and road noise is well suppressed at all speeds, making the Arteon a very civilised cruiser, and that really complements the car’s generally very laid-back nature. The gearboxes also stay pretty smooth in their operation, too.

The Arteon Shooting Brake hasn’t itself been tested by the safety experts at Euro NCAP, but the five-door hatchback version has, and the result applies to the estate version as well. It scored the full five-star rating, although the test was carried out in 2017 and testing standards have become more stringent since then.

Nevertheless, a good amount of standard safety kit is provided. Short-lived SE Nav models had seven airbags and an active bonnet to help better protect pedestrians, along with active driver aids such as adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, automatic high-beam headlights and lane assist. 

Elegance and R-Line models add blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert, along with a slightly cleverer adaptive cruise that provides a greater level of autonomous driving assistance.

The latest HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index might make grim reading for potential buyers of the Arteon Shooting Brake. Volkswagen was voted as the fourth worst manufacturer in the entire study for reliability.

While the Arteon wasn’t namechecked specifically, the verdict did state that although newer models like the T-Roc performed well, older volume models like the Golf and Polo didn’t, and dragged the brand’s score down overall. Since the Arteon shares its ageing mechanicals with the Passat, that might be cause for concern.

If you weren’t aware, all cars fall into a specific 1-50 group for insurance, with group 1 cars being the cheapest to insure and group 50 cars being the most expensive. Most versions of the Arteon Shooting Brake sit either side of average on that scale. The 1.5 petrol and the lower-powered diesel sit between groups 21 and 23 depending on trim level, while the more powerful 2.0-litre petrol and diesel, plus the plug-in hybrid, sit between groups 27 and 29. The R, meanwhile, incurs a group 35 rating, so premiums on that version will be a lot more costly.

The Shooting Brake was released in 2021, so all versions are taxed according to the post-2017 Vehicle Excise Duty regulations. This means a flat rate of £180 per year for petrol and diesel cars, with a £10 deduction for the plug-in hybrid.

That’s not the full story, though, because cars that cost over £40,000 when new are subject to an additional ‘luxury car’ surcharge, which adds £390 to the cost of your annual road tax for five years, coming between years two and six of the car’s life, taking your annual outlay up to £570. While some versions of the Shooting Brake were priced below that threshold, some were priced above, so it pays to know the situation before you buy.

Bear in mind, too, that the threshold includes the price of any optional extras fitted. So, if the car you're considering cost £39,999 when new, but had an optional extra worth £2, it would still be liable for the surcharge.

Very early on in the Volkswagen Arteon Shooting Brake’s life, it was offered in SE Nav trim, which sat at the foot of the range structure. These versions were still pretty generously equipped, though, with 17-inch alloy wheels, LED lights all round, keyless entry and go, four powered windows, three-zone climate control, automatic lights and wipers, front and rear parking sensors, and heated, power-folding door mirrors. That’s on top of all the infotainment and safety features we’ve already talked about. However, it didn’t take long before this trim was discontinued.

That made Elegance trim the new entry point into the range, and this brought 18-inch alloys, heated front seats, part-leather upholstery, a powered tailgate and a reversing camera. On top of that, there is the R-Line model, which adds 19-inch alloys, extra styling elements inside and out, and an electrically opening panoramic roof.