History

The Passat was placed in the middle of the sedan/saloon market segment at its introduction in 1973. Sales of the aging Beetle were declining and larger air-cooled rear-engined models like the Volkswagen Type 3 and 411 and 412 were based on older technology.
Following the Volkswagen Group's acquisition of Audi in 1964, Volkswagen used new engineering expertise to develop a modern front-wheel drive car with a water-cooled engine, and thus the Passat and Golf (the latter being introduced in 1974) were the first of a new generation of Volkswagen cars. The first Passat was developed partly from the Audi 80/Fox and, until 2005, the two shared a history.
During its development phase, the Passat was designated internally as Entwicklungs-Auftrag 400 (EA400 / Project 400), and well before its launch, production of the Volkswagen Type 3 at the Wolfsburg plant had been stopped in order to free up capacity for the new car.^[1] Wolfsburg was able to ramp up production carefully: directly before Passat production started the lines were used to assemble small volumes of the car's Audi 80 sibling which had been launched a year earlier.^[1]
The nameplate Passat derives from the German word for tradewind — and the period in its history when Volkswagen named vehicles after prominent winds, including also Golf (after the Gulf stream, Jetta (after Jet stream), and Scirocco (after Sirocco).