Should you buy one?

The Volkswagen Passat is a great choice if you’re in the market for a large family car. It’s refreshing to see a manufacturer lavish so much attention on a car that isn’t an SUV – and the results speak for themselves. The Passat is more practical, more comfortable and more refined than any mainstream SUV rival on the market today.

But is it the best estate car you can buy at this price point? That’s a tough call, because cars like the Audi A4 Avant and BMW 3 Series Touring are available with some knockout finance deals. Yes, they’re a lot less practical than the Passat, but they’re better to drive and they’re wearing far better badges – and that counts for a lot.

The Passat’s deadliest rival will be the closely related Skoda Superb Estate. It offers an almost identical blend of practicality and efficiency, but it has a better resolved interior, a broader choice of engines and it’s more than £2,000 cheaper.

What we like

The Passat is fantastically comfortable on a long journey, especially if you spend a bit of extra cash on Volkswagen’s massaging seats. Refinement is great, too, because of how much time the firm poured into perfecting the car’s aerodynamics – and its practicality blows every other rival (Skoda notwithstanding) out of the water.

What we don’t like

Volkswagen won’t sell the diesel version of the Passat in the UK, which we think is a massive oversight considering the car was designed to live its life on the motorway. The PHEV models won’t be arriving until later in 2024, either. Plus, some of the ergonomic challenges of previous generation Volkswagen interiors are still lingering – and the parcel shelf is a nuisance to remove when you need to carry larger items.