Volkswagen Amarok PanAmericana long term review

Chasing Cars has awarded barely a handful of 9/10 scores in its 12-year history, and it’s not all that surprising, because while it’s harder to come by a truly woeful car in 2025, it’s even harder again to discover one that’s truly great. Nothing’s perfect — not even me…

So when contributor Dan Gardner slapped a ‘nine’ on the top of our initial 2023 test drive of the Volkswagen Amarok – in Style, PanAmericana and Aventura guises – we knew VW was onto something pretty good.

But subsequent testing against the segment-leading Ford Ranger Wildtrak saw the Vee Dub come out on top, the ute’s excellence was crystalised.

Time, however, has been less kind to the Amarok. The lineup shrunk with the discontinuation of the manual as the sibling Ranger flourished with special editions, permanent new grades and even a plug-in hybrid option.

The 2025 Amarok update has seen the range grow with new cab chassis variants, some crucial incremental updates and the ‘10 Deserts Edition’ grade, created to celebrate the Amarok’s brutal slog across the harshest deserts of central Australia in just under seven days.

It’s a step in the right direction, but Volkswagen needs to walk, not run, if it wants to close the mammoth sales gap to the Ford Ranger, Australia’s best-selling vehicle, which collected one registration for every ten Rangers.

So what’s going on? And what on earth have we missed that has seen one half of these twins become an unparalleled sales success in this country, while the other remains a relatively niche offering?

That’s something we’re hoping to discover over the next three months.

Navigate this long-term Volkswagen Amarok PanAmericana review

• Month 1: 10,000 reasons why
• Month 2: Dirt Road Detour
• Month 3: This ute thing, ’eh?

Month 3: This ute thing, ’eh?

The Amarok spends a week at the beach serving as an all-in-one family truckster, toy-wagon and change-table – but how much should we sacrifice in the name of practicality?

As a confessed workaholic, there are a few things I desire less than a day at the beach; it’s hardly a place one can whip open a laptop and jot down an idea, or flick off a quick text message to keep projects chugging along back at base — and that’s exactly why I was there.

I didn’t manage to switch off entirely, though… as I sat on the beach and my mind started to wonder if the ute really is the perfect vehicle for adventurous Aussie families.

The last week was spent loading up the tray of the Amarok with plastic shovels, buckets and surfcraft, before cruising down to the drive-on beach with my family, in an attempt to replicate some of the precious memories I was so lucky to have as a child.

While the beach — dotted with thrashed Toyota Yarii and Mitsubishi Lancers — is hardly what I’d call ‘challenging’ for the Amarok, the peace of mind that comes from having a vehicle with grippy tyres and a low-range transfer case is always appreciated.

Five days later, with a phone full of pictures and my skin tone a few shades redder, I even changed my baby girl’s last nappy on the Amarok’s tailgate.

After a chaotic morning, the tray was packed and the caravan hitched, as we embarked on a noticeably smoother trip back to Adelaide to return my in-laws’ caravan and catch a good night’s rest.

With the 2.5-tonne fibreglass anchor now returned, we rose the next morning and pointed the bonnet of the Amarok south-east to return to our adopted home state of Victoria.

Keen to put as many miles under the tyres of the Amarok as possible before my six-month and two-and-a-half-year-old daughters ran out of patience, we took the direct route and swapped drivers — Le Mans-style — to ward off fatigue.

During nap times and those rare glimpses of silence between Bluey episodes, it was impressive just how quiet the cabin was, allowing the PanAm’s eight-speaker Harmon Kardon stereo to hum along nicely at a low volume with clarity and balanced bass.

As we pulled into our lunch stop, I was reacquainted with Amarok’s stop-start system, which is considerably faster than what was offered in my previous long-term Triton, but still far too slow to crank up the big-six and shoot across a busy street .

Unlike the Triton, however, the Amarok features no physical button to disable stop-start, a task requiring three jabs of the touchscreen to find and turn off the system – until, of course, the next time you start the ute. No wonder the aftermarket is rife with defeat devices for stop-start systems…

The PanAm couldn’t escape the juddery fidgeting from its segment-typical leaf-sprung rear suspension as we passed over train tracks and potholes, even with 400kg-500kg on board, but the ’Rok still sits definitively at the top of the pack in terms of overall comfort in the ute hierarchy.

Towing, beach driving and a proper road trip were a good way to set the tone for ute ownership, and as we pulled in the drive several hours later, the Amarok had confidently proven it was a notch above the majority of its rivals in this admittedly fairly average segment.

There were no sketchy moments of poor handling on our journey, the cabin was quiet, the suspension generally comfortable on rough Aussie roads, and the vehicle competent in all areas that mattered.

Dirty nappies, sand, mud or whatever you can throw at it – a ute tray doesn’t care what you put in it.

But the key advantage of a ute is that it features an extra degree of practicality over a passenger car, which you’re much more likely to use every day.

Between the last two months I’ve spent with the Amarok, and the six prior with the Triton, I’ve found myself hopelessly in love with the ‘chuckability’ of the ute tray, which negates any fears you’ll scratch up your boot floor or spend hours vacuuming sand out of the soft padding.

What ultimately serves as the best storage solution will be up to your use case, but it was interesting comparing the Amarok with my previous long-termer, the Subaru Outback station wagon, which you can see here, on our social channels.

Flashback to four years ago, when it was in my custody, I thought the Outback was the perfect family vehicle, and it inspired me to purchase a lifted wagon of my own – albeit one with a ‘Volkswagen Golf’ badge on it – but as my crew grew, became messier and collected more crap to carry around…. I wasn’t so sure anymore.

Over the past few months, I’d been slowly won over by the benefits of ute ownership, and the Amarok? Well, I’m beginning to like this thing a lot….

Month 2: Dirt Road Detour

Heading down a dusty dirt road to nowhere with a 2.5-tonne caravan in tow and a cabin full of occupants ready to lose their marbles, could the Amarok help me pull off the impossible?

“Nope, as I said, we should’ve taken that right”, my wife grumbled as we drove deeper down a dirt road detour, after being booted off the main highway out of Adelaide, courtesy of one of South Australia’s eternal roadworks projects.

She was right, but my intentions, as ever, were good. In tow was the in-laws’ shiny new Snowy River, twin-axle caravan, currently being showered by rocks from the back wheels of our Amarok PanAmericana.

Ironically, I’d driven past the first turn off from the suggested detour because I thought the road ahead appeared smoother, a decision that I regretted slightly more with every telltale ding of stone against metal.

The wrong turn was taking us deeper into a web of farmland access roads, consisting of winding, narrow and high-speed sections of what some may consider a rural highway — or at least the locals did.

Worse still, there was a growing line of cars that seemed to think I had some sort of idea where I was going. Now half an hour into this dusty detour, Google Maps was utterly useless and two kids in the backseat were due to wake up hungry at any minute…

With a 2.5-tonne twin-axle in tow, our gross combination mass clocked in around 5.2 tonnes and over 13 metres long — I could only pray the route we were on wouldn’t lead me to a dead end, and push on.

It’s times like these where you really do need to lean on your vehicle; consistent performance and reliability can be the difference between making a bad day catastrophic or simply a mild inconvenience.

Despite the constant crests, dips and haphazard drainage ditches carved out by the recent rain (the outback’s tram tracks, if you will), Amarok PanAmericana remained rock (or maybe ’Rok?) steady.

With a large footprint and a healthy 2.4-tonne kerb weight to remind the cart it was the horse in charge, the Amarok’s chassis felt up to the task, allowing me to lay the boot into the V6 turbo-diesel and hold a confident 80km/h on these corrugated roads.

Higher speeds were certainly possible, but above 80km/h we found the sense of stability gradually decreased, and with limited knowledge of the area and precious lives on board, we were looking to play it safe.

Lower speeds are also better for frugal fuel consumption, with the V6 ute drinking an indicated 15.5L/100km at 80km/h, which is fairly impressive for this amount of weight, though consumption climbs to 16.5L/100km if we include stop-start traffic when exiting the city.

Up front, the seats were doing their part, with a good degree of sympathy to the cushioning and enough support and electronic adjustability to properly suit the body types of both my wife and myself. I was agitated by my situation, but at least I wasn’t uncomfortable.

On the flipside, the PanAm’s light-duty all-terrain tyres on 18-inch rims felt a bit underdone for these conditions, and some longer-travel suspension would no doubt increase absorption and clearance for those looking to do this sort of thing regularly.

The ride was also gradually getting rougher as the corrugations repeatedly smashed the shocks and heated the oil inside the dampers.

Clearly, there’s room for some aftermarket modifications here, but I still couldn’t help but be impressed at the performance right out of the box.

But the towing strengths of the Amarok go beyond just the fundamentals; hooking up solo at our campsite was made easier thanks to a trailer light-check function, there are dedicated tow modes, a transmission temperature monitor and a stability control system that actually works properly with the trailer brakes.

Even as we bounced along this horrendous road, the location of the brake controller just under the touch screen is within easy reach of both the driver and passenger, and the portrait touchscreen provides more forward-visibility when using mapping software, so you don’t find yourself stuck down a dead end.

And in this case, I used the forward visibility to find my way out.

Emerging victorious onto the beautiful black bitumen road, the now significantly dirtier ute and van combination was heading the right way towards the seaside caravan park that we would call our home for the next week, before heading home to Melbourne and completing our circa-3000km round trip.

But for now, it was time to unhitch, unload and unpack our home-away-from-home, and maybe even grab a beer down by the sand before the light runs out.

Month 1: 10,000 reasons why

Hefty discounts have seen the Amarok PanAmericana become more affordable but it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing in our first month behind the wheel.

It was a bold choice to send us a ‘Bright Blue’ version of Volkswagen’s ute that was frequently referred to as ‘just a Ford’ at first, though that joke ran thin pretty quickly in the office.

Especially so for us, as a Ranger Wildtrak V6 was a previous long-term test car, and it was finished in a similar yet iconically Ford shade called ‘Blue Lightning’.

Volkswagen makes no secret of this connection, though, and nor is it ashamed. You only have to go as far as the brakes and spot the ‘FoMoCo’ (Ford Motor Company) branding to spot the connection.

It might be built in a Ford factory in South Africa, but as we’ve rattled on about before, Volkswagen has put its distinctive touches everywhere in the Amarok, from the interior to the way it drives.

It wasn’t hard to love the Ranger, it was so objectively impressive on a number of different fronts, but affordability wasn’t one of them. And with Ford being typically thought of as more value-oriented than VW in Australia, the cost difference was a bit of a shock.

Not only does the Wildtrak V6 cost $75,090, before on-road costs, our previous tester swelled to a whopping $87,648 in NSW once you added on-road costs and all the option kits.

Features such as Matrix LED headlights and a premium stereo are optional on the Ranger, yet are fitted standard on the Amarok PanAmericana.

We picked up our Amarok PanAmericana before the end of financial year when Volkswagen was running a ripper of a deal with a national driveaway price of $76,990, a circa-$8000 haircut off the driveaway price in NSW in the first half of 2024.

Since then, updated MY25 pricing and updates have been released, but we’ll touch on that later on.

The take home point here is that our Amarok PanAmericana or ‘PanAm’ is more than $10,000 cheaper than our previous Ford Ranger Wildtrak, and that’s worth paying attention to.

It is worth pointing out, though, that there is some nuance that needs to be read into this, as the Wildtrak comes standard with an electric roller cover (whereas the Amarok’s is an extra $4.6k fitted), and additional accessories like the $2800 Flexible Rack system and metallic paint do bump up the price.

Even still, the price difference is over $7500 if you’re comparing an Amarok PanAm on the EOFY deal vs a Ranger Wildtrak with the $2100 Premium Pack fitted.

As one of two flagship grades at the top of the lineup, alongside the tarmac-focused Aventura, the PanAm offers a long feature set as standard:

• 184kW/600Nm 3.0L turbo-diesel V6
• 10-speed-automatic
• Full-time 4WD
• 18-inch alloy wheels w/ light duty all-terrain tyres
• ‘IQ Light’ Matrix LED headlights 
• LED tail-lights and fog lights
• Roof rails
• Towbar and integrated brake controller

And on the inside:

• Leather upholstery on the seats, shifter and steering wheel
• 10-way power-adjustable and heated front seats
• 12.0-inch digital driver’s display
• Wireless phone charger
• 12.3-inch multimedia screen
• Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto
• Ambient lighting

It’s a list that really did impress in our first month behind the wheel; the interior in particular stands out in this segment for feeling genuinely luxurious and yet still suitably durable for a ute – something we’ll test properly over the next few months.

We’re particularly big fans of the ‘Cricket’ leather upholstery, which looks a bit like a topographical view of some of Australia’s drought-riddled landscape, something I was able to verify personally after snatching the keys to the Amarok and setting sail with my family for a long overdue two-week holiday, in my home state of South Australia.

Taking a leaf out of my old man’s book, I topped up the tank of the ’Rok before loading up the tray for the trip. Despite barely 600km on the odometer it was at the servo, pump in hand, that I discovered the VW’s first build quality flaw, when the fuel cap fell out of my hand and onto the ground.

The culprit? A broken plastic screw that normally attaches the cap to the car. Hardly the end of the world, but not what you want to see this early on.

Furthermore, once we arrived home and began packing cargo into the tray, the accessory power roller cover revealed quality issues of its own when a cable – stuck on to the barrel with nothing but an adhesive patch – swung down and thwacked the bed liner.

It’s a point I would’ve investigated further if I wasn’t also swearing and shoving my way through packing the tray, which despite offering roughly 1000 litres of space did not provide enough room for two adults, two kids and a medium-sized dog without stacking cargo above the tub-line.

“Do we really need all this crap?” I asked my better half, like so many naive men before me. Words may serve as the chief tool of my profession, but she didn’t need any to answer me. 

What laid ahead was an eight-hour trip before we hitched up the in-laws’ 2.5-tonne caravan in Adelaide and headed up the coast for another few hundred kilometres, before we began our week-long stay along the beachside. 

It was a flawless plan that surely couldn’t be derailed in any way. Surely?