I went to a gigantic home furniture store to buy a bunch of stuff I don’t really need, and started scheming on the way to the till. I’ll be damned if I’m giving them another couple of hundred bucks to deliver the stuff to my house a week later, but I knew I had no choice.
Long-term review: 2012 Volkswagen Pasat - Week 2
Four massive boxes each near two metres in length, which means they’d have trouble fitting in your standard-issue pick-up bed... So I had no business at all doing an about-turn and heading for the parking lot instead of the home-delivery desk.
It was worth a try, to stuff the lot into the back of our new Passat, I thought, even if the inevitable conclusion was surrendering and giving up the delivery cash.
So I wheeled the laden cart into the car park, and slotted it neatly behind the Volkswagen Passat. You don’t just go jamming unfamiliar objects into unknown spaces without some safety precautions. That’s why I consulted the car’s brochure, which has been sloshing around the back seat ever since we picked up the Passat from VW Middle East. It said the luggage compartment volume is 529 litres, which meant absolutely nothing to me because I wasn’t trying to transport 529 bottles of Aquafina. At this point I had an argument with my wife, who still refuses to trade in ‘her’ 2009 Suzuki Jimny for an Eighties’ Toyota Cressida station wagon with a 2JZ. Women…
Anyway, as she tapped her foot while the man sorted out manly stuff like dropping the rear seats in the Passat, I fumbled around the back finding no latch to pull. Turns out the Passat has thoughtful handles in the boot that you tug to free up the 60/40 split rear bench.
This is great, but it still leaves you having to literally climb into the cavernous boot and give them a final push down, the alternative being walking all the way back to the rear door to drop the seats.
I didn’t bother to electrically adjust the front seats at all — both of them being tilted all the way back for my preferred driving position when it comes to anything without a clutch pedal or at least 400bhp — thinking it’s no use anyway and there’s no way these boxes will fit and I’ll have to wave the white flag at the guy behind the home-delivery desk.
But they did fit, with room to spare. I couldn’t believe it. There’s something so virtuously pleasing about loading a car up with cargo.
