Ordinarily a test drive is of value (especially when a vehicle is for my wife) but I've bought a few "early adopter" cars without a test drive and had no issues. It's kind of an adventure.
We pretty well know the form factor (a bit smaller than the current Tiguan, so a bit bigger than the original Tiguan) and I'm also assured by the proven MQB architecture and the mostly robotic assembly.
Some don't like buying first year as they anticipate bugs to be worked out. But I have found that later years are often victims of "value engineering" (= less value to me) and/or oftentimes "facelifting" which is usually not as good as the original.