For yes, this is a Passat as we very much know and love it. It’s conservatively yet handsomely styled; a finely tuned concoction of sporty, safe, contemporary and futuristic, with a few nods to the ID line of cars with width-spanning lighting front and rear and those jellybean headlamps, while still being nothing more or less than what you’d expect. Following reactions to the latest Golf and given this is historically, VW’s second best-seller behind the Golf, that’s no bad thing. That is quite a big mouth, mind.
The interior pushes things on a little more, very clearly borrowing from the VW ID.7 while being a bit less ‘tomorrow’s world’. So yes, there is a substantial 15-inch infotainment screen (powered by the latest MIB4-powered infotainment) and a 12.9-inch driver’s screen, augmented by a new windscreen head-up display. There might be embedded mood lighting in the passenger dash trim.
But look at the wheel. Praise be, an array of buttons that very clearly go up and down with what looks like nothing in the way of haptic touch sensitivity. Good lord, it’s a car! And one that looks nicely made in that Piech-esque reassuring mid-2000s Volkswagen kind of way. The ten-chamber pressure point massage seats do sound very Phaeton, even if they’re borrowed from the latest Touareg.
What certainly does carry over from the IDs, is the movement of the ‘shifter’. Gone is the faux-manual knob sat in the middle. We’re back to column shifting, which means the centre console can now hold a fairly big storage bin. It’s a practical estate, remember.