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.

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 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 the equivalent Ford Ranger Wildtrak, and that’s worth paying attention to.

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?