I’m not really sure why this picture of a Volkswagen Passat four-door fastback sedan caught my attention, other than that it’s a version of one of those cars that most of us completely forgot about and a namplate that, as of this year, is no longer available in America. The Passat ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but for whatever reason, I feel like looking back at a few of these, in whatever names they called them.
It’s easy to forget, but in America, this was Volkswagen’s first liquid-cooled car sold, a radical departure from the air-cooled, rear-engined VWs everyone knew. These made it to market before the Golf/Rabbit, even if they weren’t nearly as popular. And sure, VW had a liquid-cooled car before this, the K70, but that was an NSU design that never came to America, and they never built that many, anyway.
But the Passat was VW’s first hint that the company was changing, a front-engined, angular design from ItalDesign that looked nothing like any sort of insect. It was the start of how VW gradually became modern NSU/DKW/Auto Union, which is really what they are today.
Of course, in America, for some reason they called the Passat the Dasher, which is actually a pretty good name, and these were pitched as “luxury” VWs, which, compared to the old Beetles and stuff, they were:
VW was weird about the name for this car in America. They later changed it, in the 1980s, to the “Quantum” partially because of the Audi-derived five-cylinder engines available:
I always liked the Passat that first carried that name in America, the B3, mostly because of what I thought was a very cool grille-less design, especially in wagon form:
VW’a own press materials are less kind to it, though. Look at what their own media site says about this generation (emphasis mine):
Passat B3 (1990-1994)
The first Passat to be built off a Volkswagen, as opposed to Audi platform, this was also the first model to be marketed as “Passat” in the U.S. It was based off a stretched Golf platform, with a transverse front-engine layout; it was also engineered to accept Volkswagen’s own Syncro all-wheel-drive system. It was sold only as a four-door sedan and a wagon, with slightly bland styling dictated by aerodynamics—there was no grille at the front, just a large VW badge. The U.S.-market Passat had a standard 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine making 134 horsepower; from 1992, the 2.8-liter VR6® engine making 172 hp was available, giving the car a significant performance bump.
It was daring! Not bland! It got bland when they chickened out and added a grille back, like candy-asses.
Also, the grille-less design reminded me of the Passat’s air-cooled predecessor in the lux-VW category, the Type 4:
Anyway, when was the last time you saw a Passat fastback sedan? I can’t remember, even. Or even more rare, the three-door one: 
With those black rubbery spoilers at the back! These were kinda cool. You’re more likely to see a sasquatch driving a Lotus 7, though.
I saw one in January of this year when I was in Spain. There’s a silver one in Algeciras.
And by accident you’ve posted the coolest Passat of all. The three door is not any three door B2 Passat. It’s the 1988 “Electronic” prototype. I sat on it a while ago – and hell, it delivered. It was some sort of a halo car, with the 2.2 5 cyl. engine out of the Audi Quattro, it a/c and a (sort of) sat nav.
And it had a real party piece. Behind the rear headrest, there was a games console with a joystick, and a screen at the front. Head over to my instagram to see it, in all its glory.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq-GEc3oqMu/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Is the lead image a Quantum? I remember them as having more rounded rear quarter windows but perhaps I confused it with a Toyota Sprinter. The Quantum was the Audi 4000 platform which was why it had an AWD option, basically 4000 Quattro long roof. Car Magazine declared it an ideal getaway car because it was near invisible in traffic
I didn’t mind the lack of grille on the B3 Passat but man those wheels were tiny.
When I lived in China in 2001-03, my company car (with driver) was a B4 Passat with an extended rear compartment. A poor man’s Audi 8L or Mercedes SEL of older days. Ironically, I’d been driving a ’71 300 SEL 3.5 before I’d moved there, and a ’68 300 SEL before that.
My parents went from an 73 Audi Fox to a 75 VW Dasher after I burned a valve on the Fox on a College Spring Break trip. (It was lots of fun, until the last 150 miles where it would only go 50 in the Interstate) The Brown Dasher was much more mundane than the Fox. Although I am a poor judge as I was driving a 62-63 Bug at the time.
That said, I have owned Dashers, Quantums(TD model and 5 cylinder), and the B3 Passat back in the day. Overall, I preferred the 5 cylinder Quantum. It was fun and setup like an Audi RS. A real sleeper until I pushed it.
The grill-less B3 was the first time I ever noticed the model*, and it kind of blew my mind. I didn’t understand much about car mechanics, but I knew why they needed grills, and I didn’t understand how this VW didn’t, but it looked incredible—very much a “living in the future” moment. I know the Taurus/Sable twins were grill-free earlier, but their tall noses weren’t remotely as elegant as the Passat’s neat little face, so it didn’t seem like such a clear departure.
*I was faintly aware of the Quantum, but I barely ever saw any, and I couldn’t have told you a single thing about them.
No grill Passat is best Passat.
Which is kinda strange because I much prefer the Tesla with the faux grill.
btw, if you like car spotting, a fastback Passat appears as Camilla Parker Bowles’ ride in Season 5 of the “The Crown.”
“Forgottenest”
Jason T. – making superlatives of past participles since the early aughts
“Forgottenest” conjures those sentimental Christmas stories, like nobody remembered to get little Passat a present, but Santa did a big dramatic handbrake turn and delivered a full sized spare to the little guy just in time. Best Christmas ever.
We used to drive a company-provided B1 at the beginning of our few years stay in Algeria.
Dirty yellow color, four round headlights, a huge proud “Made in Brasil” sticker across the rear windshield.
Not too old, and the most atrocious POS we ever drove, besides a Moskvitch. Everything broke on it, all the time. And it had that old VW smell which made us nauseous. And yet it wasn’t too old.
Incidentally, this was the first (and luckilly only) car that managed to slip off its jack and fall on my dad while he was wrenching under it. And it was a very, very low car.
I managed to put the jack back and lift it, and my dad was absolutely unscathed and scratch-free – although the car had pinned him, unable to move. A little episode which could have been heavy of consequences.
Hard to believe, but we got our Wartburg w353 right after this Passat (we owned the Wartburg and bought it new), and it was leaps and bounds ahead of (that specific) Passat in absolutely all aspects.
This B1 was also the reason we never, ever, got a VW after we moved to the US.
Every time we’d consider a new car I’d bring up the Passat as a sound alterntive, and would get that “nope” look. We got through most Japanese brands and every brand had a fair shot, but VW was an absolute no-go.
I’d say VW US lost at least two sales because of it, as the late 90’s and early 2000’s Passats were cars I liked a lot, and I had a saying in what brand we’d buy. It’s funny how a car made in Brasil for export to Africa and driven by people who never planned to set foot in the US ended up costing sales to the US importer. Life is strange.
To this day, I don’t know if this specific car was a POS because of what it was, or because it was a company car in Algeria, or because it was built in Brasil. I guess a bit of all.
Brazilian here. VW do Brasil was renowned for the durability of their cars on my home market. However, most cars there of that vintage, from any maker, were total crap, so they were in a “ruler in Hell” kind of situation.
Even then, it seems you got particularly unlucky, I’m sorry for your trauma 🙂
The thing is that we were bred to think that VW is a product straight from heaven, and that it is by definition flawless. So when we got confronted to this Passat (and to the also Brasilian VW Bus that was given to us first, which was also quite bad), we had to find a culprit 🙂
I’m not sure what was so bad on them. They mostly drove. I believe the exhausts on both kept falling off, the shifters had like feet of slack, the accelerator cable kept breaking, stuff like that.
Haha, can relate, and I was bred the same way. Once I moved abroad I had a total quality shock, any Opel or even Skodas (part of VW) where worlds away in quality. VWBR was cool, but products weren’t really that good.
BTW, I also had a Brazilian Bus, loved it to death (its death), but it was also crappy. It burned on me once, but since parts were cheap, we put it back together again. I had a cornucopia of extra cables and assorted parts hidden in the engine bay…
I think there lies another factor, VWBR relied on parts availability to keep the myth of reliability, and give it to them, the aircoleed line were simpler designs, easier to DIY. This, and a comfortable market lead at the time, made them complacent. And I suppose parts were expensive in Algeria, right?
Parts were dirt cheap. And also mostly unavailable 😀
Speaking of which – was the Brasilian B1 the only one with 5-doors (as French call them, the hatch being the fifth door) and four round headlights ?
Ours was very much like the one on the second picture in this article (1975, B&W picture, rectangular headlights), but with four round headlights.
I later saw, once, a German-built Passat with round headlights, but with 2 (3-doors in French 🙂 ) doors only.
It is possible, yes, our design studio seemed to get creative quite often, but I’ll have to check it. Headlight minutiae for market-specific cars, this gotta be quintessential Autopian 🙂
This might rattle a hornets nest, but I liked the first Dasher because it reminded me of the Lamborghini Espada, which I disliked because it reminded me of the Dasher.
I understand and completely approve of your logic Hoonicus! 🙂
Are they trying to deflect from the NMS Passat with the B3 description? “It didn’t look boring at all!! It had a grille!!”
I’ve had a B3 for the last couple of years, a 16v. I really love that car and it’s really done a lot for, unfortunately it’s going off to a new owner this week as it’s kind of stopped being a “project car” and has just turned into a car.
Goodbye B3, hello W116.
An admirable result, I’ve never succeeded in graduating a project car to just a car.
The cult around the Passat (members are easily outnumbered by taillight fetishists) started as early as the 90s
https://www.fusselblog.de/1-passattreffen-der-passat-kartei-deutsc/
This man has dedicated himself mostly to the first generation of Passat(i) and come up with some wild interpretations and made them TUeV compliant
https://www.fusselblog.de/category/fahrzeugportraits/
I think I remember seeing a K70 on a US dealer’s show floor, but seems like very few actually sold here.
Drove the Audi 80 version when it first came out and it was a revelation, problem was I couldn’t afford it on student financial aid and a part time job. So I bought a used Cooper s instead…
In Finland B3 Passat is known as “Muumikeula” meaning roughly “Moomin front end”, and if you compare a B3 in white and a Moomin character I think you can see why.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fi/thumb/7/77/Muumipeikko2.jpg/250px-Muumipeikko2.jpg
I always thought the VW 4 series grill was a blatant ripoff of the BMW sharknose. Put a kidney grill in the middle and it could have come right off a 3.0, Bavaria or an E12.
The very first car I remember my parents having is a school bus yellow Dasher. They had it in the 70’s up through.. ’83 or ’84 when they sold it to one of our landscapers.
I remember the drive from North Jersey to Florida, the dash that lit up red, my brother burning his finger on the cigarette lighter, and that once in a while it would “conk out,” as my mother would say.
I don’t know why, but as a kid I kinda liked the car. After the Dasher, it was a Reliant K wagon with vinyl seats. One of my siblings smushed a raisin in the rear center seat that was for some reason never cleaned and we used to fight over not sitting in the raisin seat. The Dasher never had a raisin seat.
I thought my siblings and I were weird as kids but then I hear stories like this and realize that all kids are weird.
The B3 kinda looked like the 90’s electric VW that never was. That front is just so clean and cool.
What strikes me about this lead pic is how old fashioned this body style looks. And yet, the most modern cars we have now, the electric ones, have all adopted some version of this old fastback style. Embiggen everything below the belt line (wheels, tires, ride height, battery tray) and you basically have a Model Y /Mach-E /Ioniq 5.
Deju Vu is a bitch at times.
I had a ’76 Dasher in the mid-eighties. It was a great driver, but a lot of things broke:
Interesting that there’s all of this hate of the black plastic cladding around the wheel wells of CUVs/SUVs nowadays, but yet here we are, looking at an amazing 1983 fastback Passat with . . . black plastic cladding around the wheel wells.
Yeah but that’s a Yurp model.
I liked the old Dasher name as well as Rabbit. I get the whole “world car” rationale regarding nameplates, but the Passat, Jetta and Golf designations do not speak to me at all. Might as well be boring numbers.
All the traditional generic VW names are names of a different Wind. Scirroco, Golf (Golfstrom/Gulfstream), Passat etc. Ok maybe not Polo…
Polar winds.
I’d love a B3 wagon as well, just such a cool design! Like the perfect mix between a Ford Sierra and a Mercedes-Benz 190 🙂
The 1983 one is just old 1970ies design with a little 80ies added on, I hate that one 🙁