2023 Volkswagen Atlas Owner’s Manual

If practicality, with maximized cargo space and seating room, is more important to you than style and aesthetic superiority, the Volkswagen Atlas may be the perfect pick for you.

It's not that this car is particularly ugly, but for a Volkswagen, its boxy exterior is fairly plain, and the primarily utilitarian interior does not aim to impress as well. The 2023 Atlas, like its most recent 2022 predecessor, focuses its power points on maximizing the amount of room available to you in this mid-size three-row form factor, offering a more practical build than most of the top picks in the category.

The most obvious indication of this design ethos is the Atlas’s third row, which is room enough to provide comfortable seating for full-size adults, a big selling point considering this vehicle’s relatively meager footprint. You also get an abundance of well-placed storage cubbies and a sizable cargo area that combine to create a functional cabin that can match the needs of just about any suburban family.

However, the tradeoff is the fact that the interior is going to fail to win design awards. The pragmatic materials and layout featured in the cabin are a little less plush and aesthetic than you would expect from a Volkswagen of this standing, especially when placed side-by-side with category leaders like the Mazda CX-9 and the Kia Telluride.

The 2023 Volkswagen Atlas is also fairly conservative in the powertrain department with only two powertrain options: a base 2-liter four-cylinder turbocharged engine that produces 235 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque and a higher-powered 3.6-liter V6 alternative that makes 276 horsepower and 266 pound-feet of torque. Both engines come paired with an eight-speed automatic transmission and can have either front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive.

Models with the larger V6 engine also come with a factory-fitted trailer hitch and an improved towing capacity of 5000 pounds, 3000 pounds higher than the trims with the base engine.