MOTOR BRIEFS
SA parts ways with the VW Passat
Declining sedan sales lead to the plug being pulled on the long-serving family car
SA says cheers to the Passat Just as the latest Passat is getting ready to have its coming-out party at the Geneva Motor Show in March, Volkswagen (VW) SA has decided to call time on the long-running model range. The Passat has been on the local market since June 1974 but VW finally decided to pull the plug after the mid-sized sedan sold only 157 units in 2018. It’s a tough time for sedans in general as modern car buyers increasingly flock to SUVs instead. It wasn’t always that way, and in its late 1970s heyday the Passat sold 60,000 units over five years. It was discontinued in the mid 1980s and returned in the late 1990s but sales never really took off for the well-equipped but conservatively styled family sedan, with only 10,692 units sold between 1999 and 2018. What partly sealed the Passat’s fate was the local introduction of the shapely new VW Arteon coupe-sedan in May 2018, which has outsold its more conservative stablemate (though it’s still a niche seller with 211 units sol...
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