Hey MSU. Just curious, why you left the VW Atlas? Atlas was a very strong contender when I was shopping but choose the MDX and I have been very happy with it. For me the Atlas interior felt a little cheap and as the VW salesmen told me "Well, VWs are Utilitarian and are geared for the Working Man" What? I spend this much money for low grade interior and that was their reasoning? Was the Atlas good for the 3 years you had it?
Thanks!
We bought our Atlas cheap. We had it for 4 years 37k miles and got about $7k less as a trade-in than what we paid for it new. We also looked at the new Atlas when shopping for a replacement, but they got too expensive for what they offered and only minor things changed in 4 years.
Ours had some ongoing issues since new with vibrations at highway speeds. It manifested itself the most when I really needed a comfortable ride - on long vacation trips. No wheel balancing or tire changes helped. I finally bought an app that identifies possible causes of the vibrations in cars based on their frequency and it indicated problems with the drivetrain. It also had some minor problems that I attribute to it being first model year.
Given all that and our worse than bad experience with local dealer it was designated to be replaced a long time ago. But with us using it mostly for in-town school runs it was not urgent.
My wife really liked it. She liked the "utilitarian" design inside, materials quality aside. It was very spacious. Large cargo space. Having big child seats buckled and being able get to the 3rd row was huge in usability. Abundance of storage all around.
It was a car made for a family that has other priorities in life than caring about scratches on leather seats or wood trim. It shined for family with small kids that sometimes needed 3rd row access, did large Costco trips or/and needed loads of storage. Very well thought out car from that perspective.
It was engineered and built in a very solid way. From what I noticed so far installing some add-on on the MDX and looking at the undercarriage, I think it was built better than the MDX (adjusting for a price-point).
It also was front-drive biased with a weird throttle response and I hated scraping the tires every time I was taking off uphill with a turn.
If I was going to get another one, I would probably get the 2.0T and add the APR tune to it. The V6 was a bit of a disappointment.
