Volkswagen Passat GTE 2015 Review

Volkswagen’s numbers on plug-in hybrids look like this: There are about 200,000 of them on the world’s roads today. By 2018, there will be about 900,000. By 2022, there will be about 3.3 million sold a year.

But, it seems, not here.

Volkswagen Australia isn’t reading off the same cue cards, having already ruled this car out of the running for our roads. Pity.

It cites cost as the major reason, plus a lack of demand, but it’s hard to know if you want something relatively radical if you never get a chance to drive it and see how simple it really is to use.

Upmarket sister brand Audi is taking on the plug-in hybrid thing with a bang in Australia, but the more mass-market demands of Volkswagen mean it just can’t bring itself to. Yet.

The pity is that plenty of people would find the Passat GTE does just about everything they’d need a car to do and it would do a surprising amount of it on electric power.

It’s got a 50km range when the battery is fully charged, which gives it enough to get most Australian commuters to the office in a pure battery-electric car. And one with no compromises to the packaging of the normal Passat, save for eating up the boot-underfloor space in both sedan and wagon forms by moving the petrol tank there.

Of course, anybody using it at the outer extremes of that range would have to charge it at the office to get it home electrically again, but (and here’s the important bit), they wouldn’t have to charge it to get it home if they didn’t want to.

The Passat GTE follows up from the Golf GTE, marrying a 1.4-litre, turbocharged petrol four-cylinder engine with an 85kW electric motor. There’s a 50-litre petrol tank to provide energy for the petrol engine and an 8.7kW/h lithium-ion battery to do the same thing for the electric motor.

Working together, they can move the 1735kg Passat to 100km/h in 7.6 seconds and keep accelerating it to 225km/h, but as a pure electric car, it tops out at 130km/h. Either number is plenty fast enough in Australian conditions, but know that cruising at speed in the pure electric mode is not a very efficient way to move.

What does it lose? Well, it adds a fair bit of heft to the Passat show, largely because it’s running two motors and has two fuel tanks. You can spot this added weight quickly, because the GTE’s nose is less willing to snap to one side than its single-engine siblings and it rolls a bit more.

But it doesn’t lose a lot more than that. Oh, there’s some squidginess in the top half of the brake pedal’s travel when you give it a light push, but that’s because it’s using the electric motor to regenerate energy for the battery, rather than actually clamping down on the wheels with the brake pads. You can pull the gearlever across into its 'B' slot to make it brake even harder with the electric motor and the pedal feel is also more consistent this way.

But that’s really it. It gains an awful lot, from the eerie, uncanny silence of its low-speed electric running to the new multi-media graphics and an 1100km range that could see the car (more or less) travel from Sydney to Noosa on a single tank/charge.

That job would seem particularly easy because it is capable of braking, accelerating and even steering by itself when it’s on active cruise control (with legislation the main reason it doesn’t do it all the time – well, that and the self-steering thing is still a bit wobbly).

The car starts in its electric mode by default and it’s still novel enough that it forces you to check that the systems are actually running. You push start and nothing happens. No kick, no turnover, nothing. Apart from a few lights and graphics, it just keeps doing the same nothing, at the same volume, it did when you got in.

And you sit looking at the same interior the rest of the Passat range has, give or take an extra button on the centre console and some new graphics in the instrument cluster. That’s to say, it’s good.

The steering wheel fits to the hand just so, even if its inner acreage is getting built out with high-density buttons now, and the interior design emphasises width and solidity over pure style.

But there is a lot of space inside the GTE’s cabin, and plenty more in the boot, mercifully unaffected by the additional battery it totes.

The 1.4-litre motor delivers 115kW of power between 5000 and 6000rpm, while it backs that up with 250Nm of torque from 1600rpm to 3500rpm. The electric motor chimes in with 85kW of its own.

Together (which is how they work in the GTE go-fast mode), they give 160kW of power and 400Nm of torque, which should be plenty for anybody green enough to buy the GTE in the first place, because it’s plenty to drive the Passat towards the upper end of where it’s happy.

The forte of the Passat GTE is quite different to the Golf version, which carries the same powertrain. The hatch GTE is an almost credible rival to the GTI and GTD. It’s a sort-of almost GTI in a straight line, but with a lot of other non-sporting tricks. The Passat GTE is designed to feel more relaxed everywhere, largely because it’s not trying to aim up at two different buyers.

That’s how it feels on the road. Relaxed. It takes everything that can be thrown at it and crushes it underfoot, using its added weight to its advantage over the rough stuff. It never falls into wallowing and nothing beneath the skin is ever intrusive.

It wafts though the commute like a zone of silent, calm, tranquillity in a crazed world. It’s especially like an anechoic chamber in electric mode, but it’s not bad in its hybrid mode, either.

When it’s driven in Hybrid mode, it uses both the electric and petrol motors as its brain sees fit, and it’s in this setting that it claims the stunning NEDC figure of 1.6L/100km.

Sure, you might not get that in the real world, unless you’re a committed plugger and you can recharge at work, but there are people who won’t need to refill the fuel tank for months at a stretch.

There’s also a Battery Charge mode, and the car can hold over the battery’s juice in reserve if, for example, you know you’re going to come off a constant cruise (where petrol is more efficient) and into a cityscape (where it’s electric all the way, baby).

It doesn’t matter what mode you’re in, really, because you’ll barely notice the difference between the varying degrees of petrol-ness and electric-ness that are doing the driving. It’s so smooth as it slips between its two operating systems that they are, for all intents and purposes, operating as one.

Sooner or later you’ll get the chance to find out. Hope for sooner.