The taxonomy of cars was once straightforward: Sedans had four doors and a trunk; coupes had two doors and little back seats; roadsters had two doors, two seats and fabric tops that -- if they were British and it was raining -- piddled down your back.
These days, using the power of computer-assisted design to save time and tooling costs, automakers can knock out interesting, low-volume variants that blur these neat-and-tidy categories. A prime example is the exquisite Mercedes-Benz CLS, a rather more intimate four-door "coupe" based on the dreadnought S-class sedan. BMW calls its four-door X6 a "sport-activity coupe," though to me it looks like a lightly crushed X5.
And now, out of the same high-German hymnal of amortized engineering comes Volkswagen's new Passat CC.
Based on the "classic" Passat, the CC is, according to VW, a four-door coupe on the grounds that it has a lovelier, racier roof line than the standard Passat. This obviously is a miserable threshold of achievement. The Passat, for its many virtues, isn't what you'd call a looker.
So as I ponder the CC's gently bowed roof line -- the sleek ascent of the windshield, the elegant descent of the rear glass, the frameless side windows, the Cartesian harmony of it all -- my first question is: Why doesn't the regular Passat look like this? Never mind the coupe-sedan semantics. The Passat competes with some very handsome fast-backed four-doors -- the Nissan Maxima and the Mazda6 come to mind -- and compared with them the Passat looks like corrective footwear.
Maybe the CC should be the volume product and the classic Passat can be marketed to people with, um, excessively large hairdos. I wonder if Gov. Blagojevich is in the market?
The CC surrenders some rear headroom (1.5 inches) to the aero gods, and one needs to be just slightly more limber to duck under the low roof to get in back. But I had no trouble getting in, or making my 6-foot-1 self comfortable. Note that the rear seat of the CC accommodates only two butts, not three as in the Passat (a covered storage bin occupies the center seat position). Owners rarely, if ever, put five people in a five-passenger mid-size sedan, so it's no hardship, really.
Overall, the CC is 2.2 inches lower and 1.2 inches longer than the Passat, while sharing the platform's 106.7-inch wheelbase.
