Who would buy a brand-new car and chop it in half? It sounds crazy, but it’s a practice that might be more popular than you think. Australian buyers besotted with payload prowess have been chopping, converting and stretching otherwise perfectly good vehicles for many years now. Why? Because their wants and needs outgrow the footprint of a ‘normal’ 4x4 ute. T...

In a world crammed tight with autonomous this and automatic that it’s refreshing that some of us still hanker for the simple things. More than that, it’s encouraging that a global car-maker as big as Volkswagen cares to listen – and act – on the requests of the few. And so it is with the first six-speed manual variants of the Volkswagen Amarok V6 dual-cab ut...

The stars of the ute world used to be the no-frills workhorses, but all of a sudden it's the good-looking ones that are getting all the attention while the quiet achievers get overlooked.  Enter, then, the Volkswagen Amarok 2019 Core V6. Priced at $49,990, it's a fit-for-purpose ute (the cheapest of the V6 range) that has gone largely unnoticed by buyers dra...

With the growing popularity of increasingly fancier and pricier 4x4 dual-cab utes caught in an engine-downsizing culture, an alternative choice that’s big on heartbeat capacity, if low on frills and somewhat budget friendly, mightn’t be the trendiest for our times. But while it's pushing against convention, the base Volkswagen Amarok Core V6 is surely hugely...

The ute segment has had a few shake ups in recent months – the all-new Isuzu D-Max and Mazda BT-50 have hit the market, the sales-leading Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger have received a raft of upgrades, and new rivals from China loom. The more that changes though, the more the Volkswagen Amarok stays the same, living on in the first-generation guise initially...

Have you ever come across the footage that showed a diesel Volkswagen Amarok V6 pulling a 747 on runway? Naturally, you take that sort of stunt with a grain of salt but after driving one, the picture starts to make a lot more sense. The 2020 Volkswagen Amarok V6 TDI580 Highline is the second highest specification Amarok you can buy, and is one of the few dua...