2011 Volkswagen Passat for Europe - First Drive Review

A new Volkswagen Passat is coming, but we won’t see it in the U.S. Instead, we’ll get a yet-unnamed replacement currently known only as the “new mid-size sedan” and likely to be called, uh, Passat. But it won’t be the same as the Passat the rest of the world drives. Are we missing out?

Visual ties between everyone else’s new Passat and the previous car are obvious. The daylight opening, with its BMW-like kink, carries over, and the wheelbase remains virtually identical. But the design team has managed to transform the look into something rather more angular and substantial. The side panels now have creases with smaller radii, the shoulder line stretches through the C-pillar, the front overhang is shorter, and the rear overhang has been elongated.

The shortened front end was made possible by using the CC’s crash structure. The dashing side mirrors are another donation from the CC parts bin. The new Passat’s somewhat bulky front grille and lighting units evoke the Phaeton, as do the taillights. The standard lights look fine to us, but ordering xenon bulbs up front also nets LEDs in the rear, like those on the Phaeton. In Europe, the new car is also available as a station wagon called the Passat Variant.

The interior carries over with few changes. Most notable are the beautifully executed wood trim and the arrangement of buttons around the shifter knob. VW needed more space for buttons—on the previous model, certain options were excluded because there was nowhere to put the associated controls. However, as in the new U.S.-market Jetta, there is evidence of cost cutting inside. The lower dashboard is made of hard plastic, and the stitching on the door armrests is fake.

Slow Motion Doesn’t Feel Slow

VW put a lot of effort into improving the sound deadening, and it paid off. We sampled the Passat with three of the 10 or so engines that will eventually be available globally, and it exceeds class standards with any of them. Perhaps the most surprising is the extremely efficient BlueMotion, powered by a 103-hp, 1.6-liter turbo-diesel. It gets 55 mpg in the (hugely optimistic) European cycle—compared with 59 mpg for a Toyota Prius—and doesn’t feel horrendously slow, despite its anticipated 12.2-second crawl to 60 mph. It will actually cruise at speeds upwards of 100 mph, although not far beyond.

To reach deeper into that range, the top diesel is a 168-hp, 2.0-liter TDI that offers 258 lb-ft of torque coupled to a six-speed dual-clutch transmission. Top speed is 139 mph, and the engine rips the car forward in any gear. The soundtrack is recognizably diesel but is subdued and not intrusive. A 200-hp version of this engine is a possibility in the future.

Cooking with Gas

We also drove the 1.8-liter TSI, with a 158-hp gasoline engine coupled to a seven-speed dry dual-clutch gearbox, and it excelled, too. Although it doesn’t pull as strongly as the 2.0-liter diesel, we have no reason to doubt VW’s modest claims of a 0-to-62-mph sprint in 8.5 seconds and a 137-mph top speed. We do wish this engine had more energy at higher revs, though. Fuel economy is 34 mpg in the European cycle.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to drive the uplevel gasoline engines. VW offers the 2.0 TSI, with the 208-hp EA888 engine that’s also used in the European GTI. The top-of-the-line model is the V-6 4Motion, with a 300-hp, 3.6-liter VR6, which transmits its power to all four wheels through the six-speed DQ250 wet dual-clutch transmission. This engine was heretofore confined to the Passat R36, a sporty derivative that is being killed off. “An R model has no priority” now, says VW engineering chief Ulrich Hackenberg.

Scratch Golf

Although the Passat’s PQ46 platform is essentially a variation of the Golf underpinnings, it doesn’t drive that small, instead feeling every bit the bigger car. But the accompanying serenity doesn’t come at the cost of agility. The power steering is light but nicely weighted, there’s lots of grip, and the stability-control system executes its corrections so quickly that it usually preserves corner-exit speeds. The available XDS system, taken from the GTI, uses the brakes to approximate a limited-slip differential and makes hustling through turns less of an understeering mess.

VW boasts no fewer than 19 assistance systems designed to chaperone you and steer you clear of harm in just about any situation—like parking your car, being tired, or staying in your lane. The Passat will self-park, warn you when it thinks you are sleepy, monitor your driving, and even pop the trunk open if you move your foot under the rear bumper so you don’t have to put down those cases of beer.

Yes, it’s a loss that we won’t get this Passat here. But U.S. customers have proven time and time again that they are not ready to pay a premium for this kind of engineering—not this side of Audi, BMW, or Mercedes-Benz. Instead, we will get that “new mid-size sedan” that is bigger and has a longer wheelbase but is somewhat decontented. Since we can do without most of the nanny systems, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we hope the Germanic driving manners and feel of the Passat translate to the “NMSS.”