Club towcar review confusion

You do not need to worry or do anything.

I can understand your confusement regarding the weights. It is not made any easier by VAG often giving two max tow limits that are dependant upon gradient. The club also looks at an 85% max weight match.

I look at the whatcar website https://www.whatcar.com/make/volkswagen/t-roc/hatchback/versions?id=n17376 and towcarinfo website https://towcar.info/

Over the tail end of my 25 years of towing trailer tents and caravans I've found the later site to be very helpful.

The 1.5tfsi engine in the T-Roc is an excellent power plant. I have this engine in my Audi A3, a vehicle that under the skin started with the same floorplan as the T-Roc. The T-Roc is about 20kg heavier though.

I currently tow a pop-top Eriba that at 2.17m width is fairly standard, but at 2.24 high is low. It does however typically run at about 1350kg [I can go to 1500kg] so it's significantly higher than your 1154kg. I have towed this van for about 3.000 miles.

The engine easily copes with these weights and returns 30-36mpg when towing. I have found stability to be very good as I am sensible with my tow speeds

My previous van was a slightly smaller and lighter Eriba at 1200kg. I towed this for about 16,000 miles with the Audi, returning 34-40mpg. 

Interestingly, for me, I have found towing the heavier van feels even more sure footed.

Colin

It strikes me that the magazine added the 1500kg towload limit to the kerbweight to arrive at the maximum permissible gross train weight, which is, of course, wrong. At least one variant of the T-Roc can even tow up to 1800kg.