passat

The Volkswagen Passat is a large family car marketed by German automaker Volkswagen through six design generations since 1973. Between the Volkswagen Golf / Volkswagen Jetta and the Volkswagen Phaeton in the current Volkswagen line-up, the Passat and its derivatives have been badged variously as Dasher, Santana, Quantum, Magotan, Corsar and Carat. The successive generations of the Passat carry the VW internal designations B1, B2, etc.

In 2008, Volkswagen extended its range with the launch of the Passat CC, a “four-door coupé” version of the Passat.

Volkswagen currently markets two variants of the Passat globally. In January 2011, Volkswagen announced that the new mid-size sedan (NMS) being built at the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant for the North American market would be named the Passat. Shanghai Volkswagen Automotive also manufactures the Passat NMS in its Nanjing factory. The NMS is not going to be sold outside the North American, South Korean, and Chinese Markets. A different B7 Passat model is sold outside of these markets. The Volkswagen Passat NMS won the 2012 Motor Trend Car of the Year.

Following the Volkswagen Group‘s acquisition of Audi in 1964, Volkswagen used new engineering expertise to develop a modern front-wheel drive car with a water-cooled engine, and thus the Passat and Golf (the latter being introduced in 1974) were the first of a new generation of Volkswagen cars. The first Passat was developed partly from the Audi 80/Fox and, until 2005, the two shared a history.

During its development phase, the Passat was designated internally as EA400 (Entwicklungsauftrag 400, or “Development Order 400”), and well before its launch, production of the Volkswagen Type 3 at the Wolfsburg plant had been stopped in order to free up capacity for the new car.^[2] Wolfsburg was able to ramp up production carefully: directly before Passat production started the lines were used to assemble small volumes of the car’s Audi 80 sibling which had been launched a year earlier.

The nameplate Passat derives from the German word for trade wind — and the period in its history when Volkswagen named vehicles after prominent winds, including also Golf (after the Gulf stream), Jetta (after Jet stream), and Scirocco (after Sirocco).

Nameplate etymology

Though numerous sources suggest the Passat nameplate derives from the German word for trade wind, reflecting the period in Volkswagen’s history when it named its vehicles after prominent winds and currents (e.g., the Volkswagen Jetta (after the Jet stream), Volkswagen Bora (after bora), and Volkswagen Scirocco a 2013 report by former VW advertising copywriter Bertel Schmitt, says that — after consulting knowledgeable VW sources including Dr. Carl Hahn, former Volkswagen of America Chief and WP Schmidt, former sales chief at Volkswagen — no conclusive evidence suggests that Volkswagen employed a naming theme for its then new front-drive, water-cooled vehicles; nor that the names trace etymologically to any particular theme, nor that any naming system “was ever announced, either officially or confidentially.