Down and dirty VW workhorse gets a new suit

NOT too many vehicles are as imposing as the first VW purpose-built pick-up, the Amarok and I can safely venture that the version we tried recently — titled the Amarok Aventura — is perhaps the most outrageous car to have decorated the driveway this year, other than the preposterous Ford Raptor, which looks like it just drove off the set of a Mad Max movie.

Now, pick-ups are not normally the soup du jour in these quarters, although we have had fun in some of them down the years, most notably the Toyota Hi-Lux and the aforementioned Raptor. The thing is that these things are usually of the genus ‘antediluvian’ in engineering terms and, in general, about as sophisticated as a wheelbarrow.