• Accommodating front seats
• Enormously spacious rear seats
• Plenty of safety equipment

How much space is there?

Ample. The Volkswagen Passat is all about practicality and comfort. The front seats offer excellent headroom and legroom – and there’s so much elbow room, you can drive spread out like you’re relaxing on your sofa at home.

Rear-seat passengers get the best deal, though. The Passat’s rear seats are vast, offering excellent head and seriously impressive legroom. If you’re cross-shopping between the Passat and similarly priced SUV – and you need a lot of space in the back – bin the SUV off and buy this estate. There’s no competition.

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Volkswagen has also made a few little changes to increase the amount of usable space in the Passat’s cabin. For example, it’s moved the gear selector from the centre console to the steering column, where the right-hand stalk would normally be. That’s freed up a load of space in the middle of the cabin for an extra storage bin.

If we had to nit-pick, it’s a little strange having all the controls for both stalks on the left-hand of the steering column. The windscreen wiper controls have been moved onto buttons, which makes the stalk rather cumbersome to use. You get used to it, though.

Boot space and storage

Here’s where the Passat really gets into its stride. Because Skoda (the famed purveyor of ruthless practical family wagons) handled the car’s development, it has a cavernous boot. The standard car offers 690 litres of space, which is 120 litres more than you get in the larger and more expensive BMW 5 Series Touring. Plug-in hybrid models sacrifice a bit of space to their battery packs, but they still have a healthy 530 litres of space.

It gets even better when you fold the Passat’s rear seats down. That unlocks a scarcely believable 1,920 litres of boot space. That’s 100 litres more than the Mercedes E-Class Estate’s maximum capacity, 220 litres more than the BMW 5 Series Touring and 240 litres more than the Audi A6 Avant.

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The Passat’s parcel shelf is needlessly awkward, though. Like most estate, it’s a roll-top unit – and it automatically retracts when you open the boot. That’s handy for when you have armfuls of shopping. But, because it locks into powered runners either side of the boot, it’s a pain to remove when you need to carry larger items.

To remove it, you need to pop the cover out of its spring-loaded mounts above the strut towers and then wrestle the roll of fabric out of its runners on the diagonal. It would have been far easier to use if Volkswagen had just added a relief at the rear of the track to allow the luggage cover tabs to easily slide out.

Safety

• Not yet tested by Euro NCAP
• No reason why it shouldn’t do well
• Stacks of driver assistance tech

Euro NCAP hasn’t got its mitts on a Passat yet. However, when it does, we can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t get a good result. It’s based on an evolution of Volkswagen’s MQB architecture – and cars built on those underpinnings have been collecting five-star safety scores since the platform was introduced more than a decade ago.

To give the Passat the best fighting chance, Volkswagen has loaded it with driver assistance technology. Even the most basic Life model is fitted with lane assist, adaptive cruise control, a traffic sign recognition system and a speed limiter. You get loads of airbags, too, including curtain airbags and a front centre airbag to prevent occupants from clashing heads in the event of a side impact.

It’s incredibly easy to turn off the Passat’s driver assistance tech if you don’t like it, too. Volkswagen’s safety kit isn’t that intrusive but, on broken roads with patchy white lines, its lane assist technology can get a bit confused.

Thankfully, Volkswagen had the common sense to design its infotainment screen with a big icon at the top of the screen that takes you directly to the safety assist menu. There, you disengage the lane assist with a single prod. Bliss.