My daughter and son-in-law's "96 Toyota Camry gave up and they desperately needed another car. My wife and I had told them that we would give them our 1998 Volvo V70 T5 ,when we got another car, so I started to look for a newer car for us. The old Volvo is real nice, it looks great and everything works. It burns about a quart of oil between 6000 mile oil changes, not bad for a car with 275,000 miles on it. It had about 90,000 miles on it when we got it and I have done all the repairs and maintenance on it. The car I found to replace it is a 2008 Volkswagen Passat VR6 4motion Wagon, with 100,000 miles on it.. We had to have a wagon for trips to the beach with the dog. This car is three inches longer, one inch taller and 3/4" wider than the Volvo. It is also 100 lbs heavier and with 280 hp it has 40 more horsepower than the Volvo, it gets the same 25 mpg as the Volvo though. The original owner must have checked off almost every option available on it, 'cause it is loaded But even with the sports suspension, it is not as much fun to toss around corners as the MINI. It's a good cruiser though my wife says it feels like a tank, compared to the Volvo. I'll post some photos later.
I had a Corrado VR6.. that was a fun and reliable motor for the size. Expensive to tune for power though (but not sure you are going to be doing much of that).. I had a remus exhaust on it.. still it was my favorite sounding exhaust. The passat should be a great car..
I've been researching the car and It seems that they didn't sell very many Passat wagons in the U.S. and Canada. I brought it to the local VW dealer to reprogram the spare key, as it had a dead fob battery when I got it and a new battery still did't open the doors with the remote. The service guy said, "I don't see many wagons in here". I looked up VW Passat sales, in the U.S. and Canada and total Passat wagon sales in 2008 were less than 20% of all Passat sales. Not only that, but the VR6 wagon with the 4motion package seemed to be by special order only, they only sold about a thousand of them in 2008. I also found out that it has a beefier version of the Aisin 09G transmission that comes in our MINI automatics, I guess I better change the transmission fluid and filter in it.