Car reviews

After setting a benchmark in mid-range family motoring for more than a decade, Volkswagen’s Passat has smart new clothes and a major upgrade in safety and convenience equipment to give it even wider appeal. Longer, wider and significantly lower, the CC – it stands for Comfort Coupe, not coupe convertible – the fresh styling doesn’t detract from the practicality for which the model is renowned. Seating is strictly for four in an elegant package that introduces adaptive chassis control (ACC), an innovation to improve driving performance. In this guise, the Passat doesn’t have the opening roof suggested by its model name but it does have the pizzazz and a list of luxury features that allow it to mount a challenge to models from BMW and Audi.