We own a '99 Passat Wagon, actually we are selling it to help buy a house, but I will not make this a sales pitch for my particular car. These are great cars and the doors shut as solid as Mercedes cars used to shut. There were 2 engines available for the years you are taling about. There was the 1.8L 20valve Turbo 4 cyl (Audi TT engine) and a 30 valve V-6(Audi). The quality of the interior materials is again where MB used to be. There was a problem for model year 2000 with the coils. On the 4 cylinder engines, there is 1 coil for each sparkplug and there was a rash off failures with these. Those have since been replaced with new ones under a recall campaign. The cars come with full size spares, Bosch ABS brakes, cruise control, pwr windows, A/C, pwr locks, tilt and telescopic steering columns etc. The bodies of these cars are made from fully galvanized steel and the under side is heavily undercoated and painted. The only problem we had was a waterpump failure (leakage from weep hole) at 7,430 miles. The cars were available with either a 5 speed manual gearboxes or a "Tiptronic" automatic. VW was able to secure the rights to use the term Tiptronic from Porsche. The 1.8L engine is a great engine. I once, ok more than once, took 3rd gear to 80 mph and still had 1K left before redline. These are well made cars.

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1999 MB SL500 (110,000 mi)
2004 Volvo V70 2.5T (220,000 mi)
2014 Tesla Model S 85 (136,000 mi)
MBCA member