With its new turbodiesel V6, the Volkswagen Amarok finally has the muscle to get the job done. And the job, in this case, is pulling a train.
VW’s Hungarian office put together this little publicity stunt, brought to our attention by Motor1. The automaker hooked up its pickup to the Villamos light-rail passenger tram in Budapest, and let the Amarok do the work.
To get the job done, the VW pickup packs a new 3.0-liter V6 turbodiesel engine capable of producing 258 horsepower (190 kW) and 427 lb-ft of torque. It can even over-boost by 14 hp to bring that figure up to 268 hp, channeled to all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission.
It’s apparently enough, at any rate, to pull a train – even if it’s a relatively light one. The train in question still weighs nearly 43 metric tons (equivalent to about 47 tons by US standards) and stretches over 105 feet (32 meters) long.
That’s a fair bit lighter than the hundred-ton train that Land Rover hitched up to its Discovery Sport (with a smaller engine than the Amarok’s). But we’d hardly call this a scientific comparison, by any stretch. (At least Smart had the good sense not to try the same with its Forfour.)
If all of this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the 747 that Volkswagen towed behind a Touareg over a decade ago. That was with a 5.0-liter V10 turbodiesel churning out some 553 lb-ft of torque, hauling a jumbo jet weighing some 155 tons. Sister company Porsche more recently did the same with a Cayenne and an A380 weighing an even more impressive 285 tons. And something tells us we haven’t seen the last of these stunts, either.