Where the roads end ...

Nine hours of driving, for a distance of 154 Kilometers. That’s hell, when you’re stuck in gridlock on a motorway. But if you drive in a world without roads and don’t even notice how slow you’re going – that’s bliss.

At the end of the day, the Touareg is dirty. And not just a little bit. It’s downright filthy. Red mud is dripping from the wheel arches. Mud the car collected on a trip through the Atlas Mountains of northern Morocco, as it made its way along tight and twisting gravel roads and through roaring rivers. “That’s just what we want,” says driving instructor Heike Hecht of the team of Volkswagen driving experience, her face beaming with joy.

A Trip from Marrakesh to a Ski Resort

It will be a long day for all of us with the new Touareg. Long, brilliant, breathtaking and challenging. In short, it’ll be an adventure. From Marrakesh, the convoy moves through the Ourika Valley, passing through villages and along countless vendor stands offering souvenirs, then up to the ski resort of Oukaimeden at an altitude of 2,700 meters.

A pair of old skis in front of a saffron farm, an abandoned ski boot at the side of the road. Beyond them the vague outline of a ski lift. From there we can see Jbel Toubkal, Morocco’s tallest mountain with an altitude of 4,167 meters.

The Road ends. The Fun begins.

Heike and her colleague, Peter Weil, whom everyone calls “Weilo”, are pointing at a sloping field in the distance. That’s our practice area.

Earthenware Tajine pots – a popular souvenir of Morocco.

Heike Hecht shows the drivers what the Touareg is capable of.

Effortlessly, the Touareg scales the hillside at the Oukaimeden ski resort.

There, we can try out and get used to the Touareg’s off-road features, like the hill start assist, that holds the car in place without using the brakes, making it possible to start driving up an incline very smoothly. There is also a hill descent assist, which keeps a slow speed without the need for accelerator or brake inputs, so the driver can focus on steering. The Touareg provides honest and immediate feedback to the driver, while remaining calm all the way. This makes it easy for inexperienced drivers to keep control of the car in challenging terrain.

“This control behavior impressed me once more, under these circumstances,” says Oliver Müller during dinner. Müller is part of the development team for the Touareg. For the Touareg, Marocco is one of the most important markets in Africa.

A Special Feature: Rear Wheel Steering

Over the next three hours, we crawl down the mountain on the other side, across rough gravel, first black, then gray in color. We pass giant boulders, green gleaming ledges and trees that somehow manage to take root in this scraggy landscape, and even grow tall and old.

At each bend in the road, someone in the convoy stops for photos. The road we are using doesn’t actually exist. It seems to be some sort of supply trail that a caterpillar created some time ago. It’s wide enough for a car, but mostly used by donkey-drawn carts. Let’s just hope none of those are coming up the mountain right now.

Oliver Müller is part of the development team for the Touareg.

The distance profile of the trip, starting in Marrakesh.

The serpentines are tight. So tight, that many SUVs wouldn’t make it through in one go. In the first turn, some of the cars in the convoy reverse up the hill a bit to get around the bend. Then Weilo’s voice comes over the radio, explaining how to take the turns. After all, the new Touareg has all-wheel steering. The rear wheels turn in the opposite direction of the front wheels, thereby reducing the turning circle.

Thanks to rear-wheel steering, the Touareg is capable of taking turns like this in one go.

The Touareg’s parking sensors start beeping and initially the person in the passenger seat seems skeptical about whether we can pass the rocks on the inside of the corner without scratching the car to bits. But it works just fine.

“Thanks to rear-wheel steering, driving on these twisting roads is actually a fun experience,” says Oliver Müller. “So far, we had only known this feature from parking in the city. Out here, in rough terrain, it makes all the difference.”

Prepared for any Adventure

The Atlas mountain range is not an artificial off-road park. It’s the real thing. A proper adventure. "The Touareg is the perfect travel companion,” says Heike Hecht. “It lets you do things like this in a comfortable, luxurious and safe environment. In this way, we can really show these countries to our guests. After all, we go to places that no tour bus will ever see.”

After finishing school, Heike started as a trainee with the postal service. When she became a full-fledged postal officer, she changed her mind, went to college and studied geography. While in college, she spent some time in Nicaragua as an election observer for the UN.
“Back then, I wanted to become the world’s first female UN-secretary,” Heike explains, as she skillfully pilots the Touareg down the mountainside. Later she became a logistician at the Rally Dakar, where she drove 8x8 trucks. Since 2006, the 56-year-old has been working as an instructor for the Volkswagen driving experience program.

No tour bus will make it up here – Morocco’s Atlas Mountains.

Heike Hecht - driving experience expert since 2006.

The Touareg with camels and clouds.

Normally, the driving experience tour of Morocco takes five days and includes a section of desert country. “When you drive up a steep incline for the first time and all you see is the sky, that really stops your heart,” says Heike. “But once we explain it to our guests, they start trusting in the vehicle and themselves.” The driving experience program attracts about 50,000 guests a year, with similar tours offered in South Africa, Iceland and Sweden. Unfortunately, on this trip in Morocco, we only get one day.

The River Crossing – A Highlight of the Tour

On the way back to Marrakesh, there is a final highlight of this tour. A small practice course on the far side of a river. Now we need all the ground clearance we can get. “Off-road mode, level two,” Weilo’s instruction comes over the radio. This means turning the left dial to Off-road and the right dial all the way to the right. With a conventional suspension, we would have reached the end of this adventure. But the air suspension can raise the Touareg by 70 mm to a total clearance of 258 mm, no matter the payload. The river just became passable.

Crossing the river with 258 mm of ground clearance.

After clearing the river, we are faced with a course that will bring the new Volkswagen flagship to its limit once again – a road with a banking angle near 35 degrees, very close to the maximum the Touareg can handle. It takes quite an effort to overcome the excitement that comes with two wheels spinning in mid-air, until the Touareg brakes and distributes power to the other wheels, bringing the car back to the surface. “It’s wonderful to experience how well it all works out – all the things we had planned,” says Oliver Müller with a smile. Since its market introduction, the Touareg won all of the comparative tests.

Average speed: 31 km/h

At the end of the day, the cold numbers read like a frustrating excursion. Nine hours on the road, including breaks, at an average speed of 31 km/h. The distance covered was only 154 km. Twenty percent of the trip was off-road, taking up 60% of our driving time. But: The time passed extremely quickly. It was a trip along the edge of a cliff that was never dangerous. An experience you would never have on your own. So, why did we do it? Because the Touareg can.