Volkswagen Passat GTE review, test drive

What’s it like to drive?

Weirdly, I got my first sense of the Passat GTE’s powertrain from the driver’s seat of the diesel car, as I followed the hybrid in a convoy. Every time a traffic light turned green, the GTE in front of me just shot off the line, and even when I flattened the throttle in the 2.0 TDI, it took a few long seconds to catch up. That’s the power of instantly available electric torque, and the VW engineers even had to warn us to be careful with the GTE’s throttle. The car starts, by default, in dead-silent full-electric mode and this makes it even more surprising when you’re thrust forward briskly at the merest tap of the right pedal.

Additionally, where you would normally access Sport or ‘S’ mode for the powertrain by tapping the gear lever to the left of ‘D’, doing so in the GTE activates ‘B’ mode. Doing this maximises the regenerative braking, to the point that, in normal use, you don’t have to touch the brakes at all. Just lifting off the accelerator results in serious deceleration, and as a precaution to other motorists, the brake lights even come on when you do this.