Fancy being the new Jeremy Clarkson?

It’s every car lovers dream to get paid to review cars. Who wouldn’t fancy having a new Ferrari or Bentley delivered to your door on a regular basis to play with? Sadly, the cars on offer are usually much more prosaic than that, but reviewing cars is still a privilege if, like us, you enjoy anything with four wheels and an engine.

But Cars UK aren’t looking for car testers at the moment (although you will be able to submit guest reviews on your car before long), but Volkswagen are – for the new VW Tiguan. They’re running a competition to find the best amateur car reviewer in the UK, which we find quite fascinating. So we’ve decide to run regular updates on how the competition is progressing over the next few weeks.Who knows, we may be out of a job!

So who’s already out playing at car tester for VW? Well, there’s a sexagenarian car buff and outdoors enthusiast, a self-styled family man and a busker-karate-knitter all let lose with a Volkswagen Tiguan as the first heat of the People’s Reviewer challenge got underway.

As part of the three month competition to find a new, “real-world” type of car reviewer, the first three competitors – Stefan from Margate, Eric from London and Dirk from Edinburgh – drove over 2000 miles as they put the Tiguan through its paces.

Each asked questions of the Tiguan in sometimes off-the-wall ways. Eric – a 39-year old IT manager in the City of London – enlisted his wife and two young sons to load up the Tiguan with years’ worth of junk that had been accumulating unloved in their house. “At one point it looked impossible, getting all this stuff into the Tiguan. We got it all in though,” he reported. “I was able to dispatch of seven year’s worth of clutter in one trip.”

Dirk, a self-styled renaissance man with out-sized hair also put the Tiguan’s roominess to the test by asking his knitting group to pile into the car and start some cross-stitching in the back. Dirk isn’t just any old knitter – he specialises in high-end design pieces (sometimes knitted out of plastic!) and his work is featured in a new art exhibition taking place on London’s South Bank. He used the Tiguan to attend the opening and test the Tiguan manoeuvrability in London rush hour traffic.

Finally, Stefan decided to get an alternative view of the Tiguan by enlisting a Brighton “superhero rock band” (dressed up as Batman and Mexican wrestlers, of course) to review the Tiguan. “We even got the guitarist with his Gibson to play out of the sun roof driving through the lower promenade at Brighton,” says Stefan proudly.

So it looks like VW has managed to line-up some slightly OTT characters to test the Tiguan. And they seem to be focusing on the Tiguan’s roominess. Fair enough; it’s a decent sized car. But it’s not too late to submit your own ideas and get to play, or you can simply vote from next week on what you think is the best review (VW are even dishing out prizes just for voting). Just head over to the People’s Reviewer and have a look.

But if you can’t be bothered, we’ll keep you posted.