As is the norm on brand-new cars, the Tavascan sports an enormous central touchscreen (15in in diameter) that controls the majority of functions, but unlike many other cars there’s more going on than just the screen. Cupra has seen fit to inject a bit of design appeal as well. Not all of it is strictly functional, but in an era when a lot of car interior design has been reduced to simply a wall of screens, Cupra’s approach is very welcome.
Initial impressions are good, then. The central spine lends some interest, as do the copper-coloured accents, the V-shapes in the seats and the very organic shape of the dashboard and air vents.
Look more closely and go poking around, and the feeling of high quality doesn’t last. A lot of the bits that look quite nice from a distance are simply hard plastic that doesn’t even feel particularly solid. Our test car had its fair share of buzzes and rattles as well. The Tavascan also suffers from some of the inherited MEB components that were subject to plenty of criticism four years ago, and could have been replaced with better alternatives by now. Think of the imprecise mirror adjustment joystick, missing rear window switches, touch-sensitive steering wheel controls and electronic door handles that want to be pulled with just the right amount of force in order to work correctly. Meanwhile, the digital driver display is the same simplistic unit as in VW ID cars.
There are a few unforced errors as well. To turn on the heated steering wheel, you need to go several menus deep into the touchscreen (or use voice control), the space under the centre console could have been a storage tray but instead is simply carpeted, and the standard seats lack tilt and lumbar adjustment. The last of those does feature on higher trims, but on a car costing at least £47,340 you would expect that sort of stuff to be standard.
The rest of the Tavascan’s interior packaging is largely the same as in other MEB SUVs, which means that it has class-typical space up front, and less outright leg room than rivals such as the Kia EV6 and Tesla Model Y, but a slightly better seating position in the back. It also has a usefully larger boot than the Kia, but as with the rest of the interior, the equipment seems a little mean. The Tavascan has a hatchback-style parcel shelf rather than a roller-cover, it has no handles to drop the rear seats remotely and, unless you shell out for the V2 trim level, there’s no variable-height floor to even out the step when the rear seats are folded down. Like the other VW Group brands, Cupra hasn’t managed to find room for a luggage space under the front bonnet.
Multimedia
The Tavascan’s infotainment system is also a fundamentally familiar one, although Cupra of course puts its own spin on the shared MIB4 interface. The cabin temperature and volume are controlled through the touch bar (which lights up), leaving the screen free for navigation and media.
The home screen is not as configurable as in the VW equivalent, but it should nevertheless be possible to get the functions you find useful to be displayed at all times. You can also pick three functions for the permanent shortcut bar at the top, and a further configurable shortcut bar appears when you swipe down from the top of the screen. This can include one-press ‘buttons’ to disable the lane keeping assistance and overspeed warning.
Compared with the previous-generation system, this iteration is much smoother and less prone to glitches and hang-ups, but that pull-down bar is the one major exception: every once in a while, it would reset to the factory presets, which rather undoes its usefulness.
