“Your car looks great. How do you pronounce the name?,” asked a man outside the local Home Depot who was admiring the blue ’09 Volkswagen Tiguan in my possession. “It’s pronounced tee-goo-ahn, a combination of tiger and iguana,” I replied. “Well, it’s a Volkswagen, right? That’s all I have to remember,” he said as he walked away shaking his head. The exchange took me back to my junior high school days when I was tasked with reading William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet famously proclaimed “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.”

The Tiguan and Juliet have a lot in common. While many are likely to fall in love with the looks of the Tiguan and want to discover more about it, they will more than likely find themselves walking into their local Volkswagen dealer saying, “I want to see one of those new SUV things you guy have. You know, the little one, I think it’s called Tigger One or something like that.”

A shame, really, because once you get past the funny sounding name you’ll find a very respectable crossover. While it looks like a miniature version of the Touareg—another, uh, ingenious name from VW—the Tiguan is much more spirited in its driving behavior than its bigger sibling. The suspension setup is a combination of the Rabbit’s MacPherson struts up front and the Passat 4motion’s independent suspension in the back, making this a capable, fun-to-drive compact crossover on par with the pricier BMW X3 and Infiniti EX.

In an effort to improve fuel economy while not sacrificing too much performance, VW tucked a turbocharged 2-liter 4-cylinder engine with 200 hp and 208 lb.-ft. of torque under the hood, which is ample to meet the tasks of daily commuting. Fill it with five adults, however, and the engine begins to feel a little taxed. You have to order the base Tiguan if you want a manual transmission as all other models use VW’s smooth 6-speed automatic. Because the dual-clutch DSG automatic does not have a torque converter to support start-up or delicate off-road maneuvers (VW expects the unibody Tiguan to be used off-road), it is not offered.

The designers did an excellent job with the Tiguan’s interior, which lives up to the Volkswagen tradition of using high-grade materials with fit-and-finish that’s akin to what you’d expect from a higher priced vehicle. The only exceptions were the eight round air vents that dominate the dashboard; a simpler design would have improved visual harmony and not made the cockpit look so busy. Still, the gauges are easy to read, the control layout is very intuitive, and the textures and grains are a cut above.

It’s apparent that Volkswagen has done a great job turning the Rabbit/Golf into a capable crossover. However, the marketers need to learn to come up with simpler names if they are going to get people to more than go to the dealer showroom and poi