Hammer Time: The Automotive Extremist
Life is sometimes about extremes, and with the extreme life of buying and selling cars comes two cars, recently purchased by me, which easily represent the polar opposites of all things automotive.
This Passat was easily the dowdiest looking of all the German V8 cars from that era according to our august founder Robert Farago. Plain jane 10 year old VW exterior. The same cheap interior panels as a $25k Passat. It consumes gas like a 15 year old minivan and yet… the damn thing has a beautiful ride.
Strong, stable, commanding, all the things that you find with the top dollar German luxury machinery back then with a pretty wicked four-wheel drive. But it would also be one nasty bastard to maintain if you kept it.
This Monday I bought this Passat’s alter ego.
A 2007 Corolla CE with the 5-speed, roll-up windows, power mirrors and locks, 145k miles, and a CD player. How Toyota came up with the idea of offering power everything but windows I can’t say, but this car is pretty much the most easy to drive car I have ever owned. Well, the other 30 or so Corollas I’ve bought are pretty much from the same ilk.
I’m sure it would return 35 miles per gallon and then some if you did plenty of highway and country driving. The only problem with it is the interior is like dwelling in some remote corner of a Tupperware party.
You have to keep one car for the next five years, and suicide is not an option. Which one would you chose?
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The Corolla. I like those generation Corollas and absolutely see nothing exciting about that generation Passat, which looks like it's been blown up like a balloon and has nothing interesting looks wise. Throw in VW "quality" and the Corolla looks even better. Life's too short to drive an ugly, unreliable POS.
I'd be doing any repairs and maintenance myself, so I might be willing to roll the dice on the Passat, assuming it has a longitudinal layout with the torsen-type center differential rather than something electronic. The Corolla would be the economical choice though, and the manual is a big plus, so it's hard to say for sure without driving both. Unless the Corolla doesn't have cruise, or at least an easily-installed non-hack Toyota-supplied add-on version. I don't want a vehicle without cruise.