Even the door panels were thickly padded on the sides and arm rests with the only hard plastics foun

In October I joined a friend on a trip to Phoenix, deducting sports travel Santa Maria CA, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He was looking for a high-end sedan, preferably a BMW 7-series, Mercedes S-class, or Mercedes CL, to purchase and drive back to Missouri for resale, so I tagged along for free.
During our time there, we rented a Volkswagen Passat and two Ford Fusions, deducting sports travel driving up and down the west and southwest on a search for new and classic cars. A month earlier, I traveled to Long Beach for the 2012 Japanese Classic Car Show where I rented a 2012 Chevy Malibu .
Upon landing in Phoenix, my friend Becky picked us up and took us to Surprise AZ where she and her husband Greg, owner/founder deducting sports travel of NICOClub.com , generously hosted us at their home for two days while we did some car shopping. They generously deducting sports travel put up with my snoring, treated us to delightful southern cooking, and offered their Nissan Frontier and Honda Insight so we could get around town.
After passing on a 2008 Mercedes CL (repaint) and a maroon S-class (unpleasant salesman), we decided to rent a car and drive to Las Vegas to enjoy some entertainment and continue our car shopping. We booked online with Alamo and picked up a beautiful white Volkswagen deducting sports travel Passat at the Phoenix airport.
When we first sat down in the Passat (Alamo lets you pick your own car from the lot), my friend Ian actually thought it was a Jetta. I wasn’t sure I believed him because I remembered the new Jetta having a small back seat and a particularly cheap interior, and the car we were sitting in felt slightly upscale and pleasantly well made.
This year (2012), the Passat is all new for the United States. In 2011, Europeans received the real successor to the Passat while here in the states, we received a different car by the same name, built in Tennessee and $8000 cheaper than its predecessor. This larger, cheaper version is also built and sold in China and South Korea.
Due to the declining value of the US dollar against deducting sports travel the Euro, the old Passat was priced thousands of dollars more than its competition. A well-optioned 4-cylinder Honda Accord could be had for thousands of dollars less than a similarly equipped base model Passat, forcing the Volkswagen brand into a small niche, never achieving deducting sports travel more than a 2% share of the US market.
As a somewhat premium brand (a status mandated by pricing), Volkswagen had difficulty expanding beyond its core audience of cute college girls in Jettas and individualists who flocked to the expressive New Beetle. You could think of Volkswagen as Apple right before Steve Jobs returned, building costly, polished products that lacked deducting sports travel mass market appeal.
After years of lackluster sales, Volkswagen altered its US strategy, building a new plant in Chattanooga which introduced a new Jetta and Passat, cheaper, larger, and softer models tailored deducting sports travel for the US market.
The result was similar to what happened when Apple introduced the stylish, bargain-priced iMac in 1998. VW’s premium image became available to the masses at non-premium prices with customers flocking to showrooms, quadrupling in sales volume over outgoing models.
Most of the dramatic price cut is due to US production, avoiding costly US-EU currency conversions while employing non-union American workers. Other savings were achieved by downgrading the interior, replacing some of the outgoing Passat’s premium soft-touch surfaces with hard plastics.
Still, the cabin presents itself as an upscale-leaning motoring environment with beautiful LED lighting and luxurious knobs, switches, and displays. The tasteful colors, lights, deducting sports travel and fonts used throughout the cabin suggest Audi more than Volkswagen, deducting sports travel and even parked alongside an Audi A6 it would take a brief moment to tell the two cars apart.
The Passat deducting sports travel grows in size with a limousine-like back seat that draws comparisons to larger cars like the Chevy Impala, Chrysler 300, and Ford Taurus. Thanks to the its traditional three-box sedan shape, a six-footer can sprawl out in the back seat without feeling like a fat guy flying coach.
With cloth seats, satellite radio, a 170hp 2.5L I5 engine, and 6-speed automatic, the 2012 Passat we rented from Alamo would have retailed for just under $23,000, undercutting the CVT-equipped Honda Accord by $400. What we have, then, is a plus-sized car with a semi-premium interior at a bargain-basement price, and Americans love bargains, especially when it comes to size.
Though I commend the build quality of the Passat deducting sports travel with its elegant lighting, durable switchgear, and precisely installed interior and exterior panels, I did find one defect. A wire was hanging down from underneath the climate control unit.
This was, as far as I could tell, the only apparent defect. The Passat’s other flaws were design-related, especially the narrow front seat seat bottoms which proved to be terribly uncomfortable. For the passenger sitting directly forward it was fine, but for the driver with his left foot planted on the dead pedal, you had to cross your leg over the large side bolster of the bottom cushion, resulting in a sleepy foot and numb thigh after an hour of driving.
Additionally, the Passat’s driving dynamics were nothing special. deducting sports travel The aging 2.5L inline-5 wheezes about like a tired old dog, exhibiting little eagerness as it lazily climbed the rev range. The automatic transmission performed its duties in the hilly parts of rural Arizona and Nevada admirably, downshifting on command and responding well to changing elevations, but around town it was too eager to upshift, killing the fun of stoplight deducting sports travel launches.
deducting sports travel The front-strut, multilink rear suspension was pleasingly supple around the city streets of Phoenix deducting sports travel and Las Vegas but painfully sloppy around corners, leaning over on its rocker panels like a Chevy Impala. It seemed as if the Passat wanted to be a firm, sporty sedan, but VW’s engineers chose to separate the car from the pavement with a pile of marshmallows.
In Las Vegas we headed south on Frank Sinatra Dr (pictured above and below), approaching a left turn hook that a Fusion, Malibu, or any other standard car would be able to handle gracefully. The Passat leaned deducting sports travel hard to the right, tires squealing like pigs in a burning barn, and plowed into the right lane before I hit the mushy brake pedal and regained control. This was clearly not a driver’s car.
The rental-grade 2012 Chevy Impala, unfortunately, is what the 2.5L Passat’s driving dynamics deducting sports travel compare to, except the Impala at least has GM s excellent 3.6L V6. If you’re into floaty, old-tech cars with wheezy deducting sports travel engines and sloppy deducting sports travel brakes, consider the Passat your slightly roomier, more upscale alternative. Otherwise, I expect deducting sports travel more from something that carries a VW badge. This stylish car is a better place to sleep than it is to drive.
While in Vegas, deducting sports travel we took a look at another S-class (price wasn t right) and I met up with a friend from Washington who flew in with his wife and some friends to celebrate his birthday an outstanding coincidence.
We returned to Phoenix from Las Vegas and changed rental companies to lock in a lower rate, choosing a smaller firm called Fox Rentacar. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that their fleet is older and with that age comes a few minor issues.
Like Alamo, you’re free to choose any vehicle in a given class. At first, I wanted to take a black Mazda 6 (pictured above, left) to California but it lacked satellite radio which Ian insisted on. As a result, we ended up in a silver Fusion.
I have always been a fan of both the Mazda 6 and Ford Fusion, two dynamically excellent cars built on the same platform that are more fun to drive than the average family car. Compared to the stodgy Taurus, the sharply-styled Fusion was a breath of fresh air.
The Fusion’s angular styling draws minor comparisons to the edgy Cadillac CTS and ten-spoke wheels on our SEL look as if they were pulled from a Mustang GT. On the other hand, some see the three-bar deducting sports travel chrome grille as a mass of reflective metal that draws its inspiration from Gillette razors.
Up front there’s plenty of room for two large Americans. I immediately took notice of the white contrast stitching deducting sports travel on the leather seats and arm rest, completely unnecessary but tremendously pleasing design details that give the midsize Ford an upscale look and feel.
Even the door panels were thickly padded on the sides and arm rests with the only hard plastics found at the far bottom and far front sections, a nice upgrade over the Passat which had a larger quantity of hard surfaces.
The compromise, deducting sports travel unfortunately, is in the rear. The Fusion’s platform is adapted from the Japanese and Euro-centric Mazda 6 which lends it a smaller deducting sports travel wheelbase than the made-for-America Volkswagen Passat. Rear passengers will encounter a shorter, lower seat cushion with noticeably less leg room. Still, it compares reasonably well to the Accord, Camry, and Malibu and a parent should have no trouble dealing with a rear child seat in the space available.
Additionally, the narrower cabin offers less room to stretch out with the driver’s knees resting up against the unusually wide center stack. And that center stack is a ridiculous mess of buttons, buttons, and more buttons.
Traditionally, Fords have offered deducting sports travel some of the simplest and most logical fan, radio, and climate controls with three sets of knobs for the fan, vent flaps, deducting sports travel and temperature and two knobs for the volume and tuner. Unfortunately, deducting sports travel in the Fusion, the fan knob is replaced by up and down buttons while the ventilation flaps are controlled by an array of tiny buttons crammed into the bottom of the stack. We never really got used to it as it required your eyes to be removed from the road as you peered over the little icons.
The Fusion, however, abandons decades of functional simplicity in favor of garish cyan blue lighting that draws its inspiration from video games. If this was Ford’s way of making up for the stodgy, boring gauge clusters found in the Taurus and Explorer, then they went overboard. It’s as if Nicki Minaj was tapped for design inspira