Perfect mix of luxury and practicality
The name Alltrack offers the big clue as to what this version of the Volkswagen Passat is all about. Rob Maetzig reports.
If James Walter ChapmanTaylor were alive today, what motor vehicle would he drive? Born in England but raised in New Zealand, he was considered one of this country’s most important domestic architects of his time, designing and building houses that were his interpretation of the simple and traditional rural English cottage style – roughcast exteriors and lime-washed interior walls, handshaped interior timbers, and smallframed windows.
During his career, which spanned almost 60 years, Chapman-Taylor designed and built more than 80 houses throughout New Zealand. Many are recognised for the practicality of their design and their close affinity with the the local landscape, even to the extent of heavy use of local materials for their construction.
Chapman-Taylor died in 1958. But if he were alive today, what vehicle would he have driven?
Given that he was very much an Anglophile, he might have opted for something like a Range Rover. But if his practicality had extended to value for the money, he might have been attracted to the subject of this review – the Volkswagen Passat Alltrack.
Now here’s a vehicle that is a nice mixture of luxury and practicality. Essentially an allwheel-drive Passat wagon that has been jacked-up so it has extra ground clearance, it bridges the gap between VW’s passenger car range and its SUV range.
This means that under normal motoring circumstances such as driving in urban areas and out on the open roads, the Alltrack operates like any other wagon. But if things get a little rougher, the vehicle can handle conditions better than a standard Passat because its ground clearance has been raised 27.5 millimetres to 174mm, and because there are tougher bumpers and scuff plates on its undersides, and plastic cladding on the wheel arches and down the sides of the bodywork.
All of this came to mind when we used an Alltrack to enjoy a weekend at one of ChapmanTaylor’s best-known creations, the North Taranaki coastal clifftop house known as Wilkinson’s Castle.
Of course it’s not really a castle, but people who stay there like to think it is, because it has concrete exterior walls that are 60 centimetres thick, and when you walk through the heavy handadzed front doors your first sight is of a castle-like inner garden courtyard.
It was actually built in 1928 as a holiday home for businessman and Member of Parliament Charles Wilkinson. These days it is still used as a weekend retreat – by members of the public, who sometimes have to book two years in advance for the opportunity to stay there and experience its rustic atmosphere. It’s best used in the winter too, because that’s the time when the delights of a giant fireplace can be experienced.
It’s a bit of a rustic adventure just getting to Wilkinson’s Castle. After departing SH3 and winding your way along a lovely coastal road, you then enter a long driveway that takes you through a substantial area of native bush, across a river flat, and then steeply up through a bush-clad hill before you burst out into a clearing containing the Chapman-Taylor creation.
We arrived at Wilkinson’s Castle with our vehicle laden with all sorts of cargo deemed necessary for a mid-winter weekend away.
Fortunate then that first and foremost the Alltrack is a wagon in the traditional sense, almost a welcome change from today’s regular diet of SUVs that most other wagon-style vehicles have morphed into.
It’s a substantial wagon too, with a rear load area of 639 litres that can be increased to 1769 litres if the rear seats are folded down.
There’s only one version of the Alltrack available in New Zealand, a $58,490 TDI with VW’s 4Motion all-wheel-drive and specified to the Highline level, but our test vehicle carried $8750 worth of optional extras including ‘‘comfort’’ front seating with 14-way adjustment ($3000), 19-inch wheels ($2250), a driver assistance package ($2250), and electric opening of the tailgate ($1000).
Are all those extras worth it? Not really. Those special front seats are superbly comfortable, and the 19-inch wheels fill out the wheel arches and help give the Alltrack a more substantial look, but they combine to add more than $5000 to the cost of the vehicle.
However the electric tailgate is very helpful, and the driver assistance package adds to the Volkswagen’s active safety in a number of ways including forward collision warning, city emergency braking, and even an amount of self-steering.
But it has to be said that the optional extras do help present a wagon that is appealing for a price less than $70,000. It’s comfortable and spacious, and that higher ride height and slightly more robust exterior do give the Alltrack a special feel.
Performance is a bit of a mixed bag. Under the bonnet is the same 2.0-litre common-rail turbocharged diesel engine that powers twowheel-drive members of the Passat family.
But the Alltrack’s kerb weight of 1769 kilograms is close to 200kg heavier than the other wagons, and this does affect its get-up and go.
The on-paper power and torque figures might be a respectable 140kW and 400Nm, but both peaks are reached further up the revolutions band than is the case with the other Passats, and as a result it is the slower car.
Once to speed, the Alltrack is a lovely car to drive however. The combination of good chassis dynamics and the 4Motion allwheel system work to provide secure handling and a firmish ride. Just the ticket for a tour to a destination that is one of the buildings we in New Zealand – well, the North Island anyway – can come closest to describing as a castle.
We’ll never know whether James Walter Chapman-Taylor would have felt comfortable seeing a German vehicle turn up and park in front of one of his English cottage style architectural creations. But he would have been happy to know that Volkswagen Passat estates, the Alltrack included, remain popular in the United Kingdom. Not only that, but the Alltrack is the most popular Passat in New Zealand too, and deservedly so.