Still trucking

It's been a short week with the Passat since the Astra went back to hopefully a watery grave.

Even in the short time I've had it the work run on a mixture of urban roads and winding country roads is giving me 7mpg more than the Astra and almost 5mpg more than the Avensis.

There are a couple of things I've noticed  on the Passat, the windscreen is strangely flat and actually smaller than the Avensis and perhaps the Astra but you only notice this if your hunting around the car looking for obvious things, in reality you will notice the roof struts and doors are pretty substantial, you get the feeling that in a crash this is the place to be.

Cruise control is a little different to the ones I'm used to, every one I've used so far takes the speed up or down about 1 or 1.5mph per click ,this takes it 5mph so I was taken by surprise when I engaged it and clicked it 4 times.

Engine is literally silent when idling, none of the normal tractor noises or body shaking that accompanies most diesels and apart from some noise when gunning it (might check the exhaust as I've no idea what the previous owner did to it) you would not know it's not a petrol car.

Quite a lively character, if you use the throttle gently then it obeys and whisks you along with a purr and a sense of purpose, if you stab it all the way then something is unleashed under the bonnet and you notice several warnings from the traction control if your not lucky.

Lots and lots of torque at low rev's considerably different engine mapping to any diesel I've driven before, you always had to give them some revs to get the power out and get the turbo kicking in or if you had a low pressure turbo you would get power low down then have to rely on the engine revs to deliver the rest.
With this you get a huge surge of power very low in the rev range, encouraging you to change up far earlier than you normally would, in fact you can pop into 4th gear at 40mph or less and accellerate quite comfortably, no engine banging or complaints.
If you resist changing gear and thrust the throttle forwards then it obliges with a force that makes you think somethings just ran into the back of you.
Although not the higest horsepower engine by far the torque is delivered where you want it and I find it's getting me to change gear like I used to 30 odd years ago when I had driving lessons (i.e correctly) and it has enough power to get up steep hills etc without dropping gear, in fact there is a very steep hill on the way to work and i've noticed yound lads in their pimped up Corsa's tear off at the traffice lights, as they hit the hill they start to sag and the Passat just whisps by with hardly a murmor.

It's certainly not as nippy as the Astra but that was perhaps the only thing in the Astra's favor and to be fair there are plenty of cars that will leave the Astra standing so that was a poor mans go kart.

Little touches like the quick warm up in the morning (4 mins to defrost this morning) and you see the difference to the 15 minutes the Vauxhall took, nice instruments and a nice cockpit to be in, you feel relaxed and in fact don't feel the need to drive around gunning the engine, you enjoy the drive and relax more - I've noticed already I woudl rather cruise along now and let everyone else race for pole position rather than drive like fury and get to work feeling i've done 5 laps.

Surprisingly VW now have a 1.6 td engine that delivers exactly the same HP and torque so this would be interesting to drive, I would estimate it's a little lighter so would enchance the feel but the tax bracket is considerably lower so a tempting engine to look at. Most modern diesels are bullet proof anyway you can mess about with throttle mappings and fuel injections etc and put as much power down as you like i've seen shoguns mapped to deliver more than you would feel safe with so I suspect the Germans have simply applied this and proven the engine won't self destruct.
Much like the old F1 days were BMW were building a new F1 engine on a budget, at the rear of a building (so the story goes) was a jumbled mess of engine bodies sitting exposed to the weather and covered in grass etc, in fact the story says the engineers there used to go for a wee wee over them as well.
On a budget they looked at these engine blocks and were surprised that they had no defects, the weathering had toughened up the blocks and effectively removed stress from them, they went on to build the first 1000hp turbo charged engine from these.

Anyone who takes rusty scrap and makes a F1 winner or puts touches like an umbrella slot in the drivers door has only one thing on their mind, a dedication to what they do.
My short time in Germany showed me the people are proud to be German and proud to do things to the best of their ability, the difference sitting in a "cheaper" Passat to the poorly conceived Astra says the Astra had few influences from across the water.

I'm pretty pleased with myself there, I went all the way through an article and never once mentioned the war ... oops