Volkswagen Passat W8 | PH Auction Block
There are rare fast wagons, and then there are rare fast wagons...
Don’t you just love it when a sensible car company briefly turns its back on sanity and creates something terrifically left-field? Like the time when Lexus launched the LFA, a V10-engined supercar that came out of nowhere and cost around five times that of its most expensive model, or when Rover dropped a 4.6-litre Mustang V8 into the 75, just a year before the company filed for bankruptcy. More recently, there’s been the Toyota GR Yaris, built from the ground up for rallying, and yet brilliant too for getting a takeaway home in record time.
Nobody does silly sensible cars quite like Volkswagen, however. Yes, it’s been making rapid ordinary stuff for yonks, but I’m talking about proper oddities like the VR6-engined Beetle RSI, the jacked-up, GTI-powered Mk2 Golf Country and the ultra-efficient XL1 two-seater. It also went through a period of chucking W engines in anything that could take them (or couldn’t, in the case of the Golf GTI W12-650 prototype). Obviously there was the W12 Phaeton flagship, the incredibly rare twelve-cylinder Touareg, and the Passat W8 we have waiting to go under the PH hammer here.
The W8-engined Passat is quite possibly the greatest example of a ‘boring car, big engine’ there is. The saloon has always been the go-to for the executive who finds a BMW 3 Series or Mercedes C-Class a touch ostentatious, so for VW to drop a sonorous eight-cylinder into the world's most sober car seemed wonderfully out of character for both the firm and the model. And it wasn’t like VW had a W8 engine on the shelf, either. The 4.0-litre unit was developed for and used exclusively by the Passat, and was essentially two narrow-angle VR4 engines bolted together. It mustered a respectable 275hp, spread across both axles through either a five-speed auto (which this one has) or a six-speed manual, and made a uniquely throaty sound that sounds (quite literally) like nothing else.
In VW’s world of million-strong production runs, the Passat W8 was chalked up as a commercial flop with roughly 11,000 examples produced and the engine itself was dropped for the following generation. You’d think that’d be enough of a sample set to find a decent example, but just 248 of those came to the UK. Factor in deprecation of ginormous magnitude and the complexity of its one-off engine and you can understand why few remain registered on the road today - with even fewer in top condition.
So hard is it to find a good W8 here that the first UK-based owner of this example presumably gave up looking and grabbed one from Japan instead. The car was imported in 2018 (so it’s spent a good chunk of its life away from salted roads) and looks to have been cherished by its previous keeper, with nearly five figures spent on maintenance since 2021. It’s also been treated to a suspension upgrade with Bilstein coilovers all round (the Passat W8 was known for being a tad wallowy), and beefier 344mm brakes. Otherwise, it’s completely stock and, by the looks of it, is in fantastic condition.
A moment for the spec: the rarer estate body, the rich Spirit Blue Pearl paint with tan leather interior, and the multi-spoke allow wheels that were bespoke to the W8. It's a lovely example, and one that’s being offered at no reserve, so every bid will count once the auction goes live on Sunday morning. Although if you fancy eight cylinders with more power and fewer doors, this E92 BMW M3 Edition 500 is heading to auction a couple of days prior…
I get the rarity and I love anomalies like this but it is otherwise like any other old Passat, the number plates lending it a certain taxi vibe, like it got the square plate so they could fit the taxi plate next to it, but its been removed.
Not sure who buys them, I expect there is a small but fiercely loyal and enthusiastic group of owners who all know each other, I expect there are miniscule numbers of them out there.
Stick some more modern MLS gaskets on and you're good to go. Something a competent mechanic could do in a day.
I wouldn't buy one. It's a lot of weight to haul around in the worst Passat ever made, dynamically speaking, for little reward as the engine is not particularly powerful.
These are from an era where VW made great sounding but not very fast cars, perfect for bumbling around on todays roads where even my 350bhp S4 rarely gets to sretch its legs.
I've had the misfortune of driving a lot of Passats over the years, well I say driving but it's more like prodding an enormous and largely inert gelatinous mass in roughly the direction I want it to go with a rubbery pole, and not once have I thought "the biggest issue with this car is that it doesn't use nearly enough fuel and it needs ever so slightly more performance"
That's very American
Lexus 4.3 - 290hp
BMW M62 4.4 - 282hp (or the mid-late 00s N62 4.4/315hp)
Etc...
The W8 certainly wasn't special in terms of specific output, but it wasn't entirely off the pace. We forget how "meh" outputs from fairly large N/A engines used to be!
A proper American V8 would be a later Modular V8 - 235hp from 4.6, rubbish even for the time. But then they do survive for mileages that would seem impossible to a lot of Europeans!
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