03-25-2017, 11:30 AM
I think you nailed it. The Phaeton was visually too similar to the Passat to discriminate it as something different or superior. That said, I had a '99 Passat V6 and you're right, the build quality wasn't that impressive, despite the fact it was simply a rebadged Audi A6 2.8L (for whatever that's worth). It took a bunch of money to coax it to 195k miles before I gave up on it.
