Volkswagen’s first made-for-India car has driven into the sunset. Yes, we are talking about the Ameo and its brief sojourn with the Indian car market.Launched in 2016, it was VW’s venture into the thriving compact sedan segment and was the first car at that time to offer a diesel DSG (one of its USPs). With Ameo being discontinued, we have decided to take a look at four fun things that we managed to do with the Ameo during its production run.
Before we get into the list, do watch our video where we tell you all the good and bad things of the car.
We always drive cars when they are newly launched or soon-to-be-launched, but with the Ameo, things went differently as Volkswagen allowed us to get up close and personal with the car and do everything needed, except drive it. Thus, this created CarWale’s first-ever first ride review. Today this has become a trend among manufacturers and we now term this as a first look review.
2018 CarWale Track Day: Volkswagen Ameo Cup Race Car
“It’s an amalgamation of the much-loved GTI with a raft of race-spec goodness for maximum attack. Starting with the engine, the 1.8-litre motor is the same EA888 series unit that powers the GTI but makes way more power, at 205bhp and 320Nm of torque.” That should give you an idea of what animal that Ameo cup car was!
CarWale builds an Ameo Cup Car!
We drove the Ameo cup car, which was mind-blowing, then, the auto geek in us got the cherry on top of the octane fuelled cake in the form of building the Ameo cup car. Our road test editor, Santosh Nair, had the time of his life interacting with the team from VW Motorsports and of course spending the day assembling the car.
The Volkswagen Ameo had the honour of having the infotainment system that won our first ever touchscreen infotainment system comparison test held at the end of 2018. It scored 81.3/100 beating out Ford’s SYNC3 infotainment system by a cool eight points.
Flying lap of the Kari speedway
Our teammate, Bilal Firfiray, got his first experience of the legendary Kari Speedway thanks to Volkswagen and the Ameo TDI. What made this even more special was that this was Bilal’s first time on the race track and he got to flying around every corner under the guidance of Indian karting champion Rayomand Banajee.
