GRR Garage: VW Passat Alltrack - Road tripping'

Well, since we were there we saw no reason not to continue on to stock up our larder with all that the beautiful area of Burgandy has to offer (snails, meat… oh, and wine) and see how much we could shoe-horn into the capacious rear of our long-term Volkswagen Passat.

It turns out the answer is quite a lot of wine, several different French delicacies, a crate of beer picked up at the last minute on the ferry back, several people, their cases and bags and still have acres of room should we have really wanted to test out the customs officials at Dover.

We spent a week motoring through some of the finest countryside (and vineyards) that France has to offer, cruising hard down the AutoRoutes and inevitable passages of the Northern country before winding our way down some stunning Burgundian country roads which wind their way down the valleys and over the mountains of the region.

What was the biggest surprise of the whole week? Was it when the Passat’s jacked-up chassis came alive down some beautiful empty French b-roads on our way back to the Chateau after a day’s wandering through Chablis? Could it have been the ease at which its cameras allowed us to swung into an incomprehensibly small parking bay at a French service station on the way back, infuriating the locals who had been struggling to find a space?

Nope, it was the moment that after a mammoth 90-minute stretch from the north of the region into the south, and traversing some incredibly mountainous roads while already stocked up with plenty of loot that the Passat Alltrack managed to register a stunning 52mpg. And no, we weren’t hypermiling, we weren’t trying to aim for new records for our Alltrack, we were just cruising through some stunning countryside of the Morvan natural park. 

Could this be the perfect car for a family holiday? You’d be hard pushed to think of better… 

MPG this week: 48.8.