The Volkswagen Passat broke one of VW's most persistent jinxes. After decades of attempts, the Passat was the first VW larger than the Beetle or Golf to sell in significant numbers. The Volkswagen Passat is the midsize car so good, that people bought it even though it was a VW.
The Volkswagen Passat story starts with failure. Introduced in Europe during 1968, the air-cooled, rear-engine Volkswagen 411 was underpowered and noisy compared to others in its size class. And it sold in miniscule numbers. So VW cast an envious eye at its subsidiary Audi and swiped the Audi 80 sedan out from underneath it. With some new badges, and the addition of both a hatchback door for the sedan and a new wagon body, the 1974 Dasher was born. And while it was, for no apparent reason, called Dasher in America the rest of the world knew it as the Volkswagen Passat.
The Volkswagen Passat/Dasher was actually the first front-drive, water-cooled VW sold in America. And proper Audi that it was, it had a longitudinally positioned, 1.5-liter four in its nose. The Dasher sold better than any previous "large" VW. But despite that it was replaced in 1982 by the forgettable Audi-based Quantum as, for some reason, the Volkswagen Passat name went into hibernation for seven model years.
The Volkswagen Passat came back (and came to America) to stay with the 1990 model-year introduction of an all-new sedan and wagon. Unrelated to any Audi, the new Passat was basically a scaled-up Golf with a transverse mounted, 2.0-liter, DOHC, 16-valve four in its grille-less nose. VW's innovative, narrow-angle "VR6" V6 was added to the Volkswagen Passat line for 1992 — the first six-cylinder VW sold in America.
But the real breakthrough for the Volkswagen Passat came with the introduction of the all-new 1998 model, which went back to stealing its basic chassis and structure from Audi — in this case the A4. With turbo four or V6 power, it was the Volkswagen Passat people bought because it was more fun to drive than the Japanese alternatives.
The Volkswagen Passat has been building on that success ever since.
