Category: Large Executive 
Price Range: £43,765 to £74,900
Clean, crisp design, user-friendly cabin control system, sumptuous materials, brilliant air-con, surprising agility, refinement, pace
Potentially huge depreciation, lacks the expected automatic parking brake, V6's wheels look too small
Hardly a 'people's car', but good enough to worry its high-class rivals.
With the Mercedes S-Class-rivalling Phaeton to top the range, Volkswagen now has the broadest spread of car sizes of any manufacturer ever. It's the ultimate expression of former VW Group chairman Ferdinand Piech's desire for the group's brands to compete with each other. The group is now trying to rationalise this desire by declaring Volkswagen a Mercedes rival and Audi - which has its A8 luxury saloon - a competitor for the sportier BMW brand.
The mega-VW - it's 16ft 7in long - looks a little like a stretched, flattened Passat, but hardly any components are shared. It's assembled at a new 'transparent' factory in Dresden, Germany in which even the assembly track is covered in parquet flooring. Buyers, who can specify many individual trim and equipment options, can collect their new Phaeton from the factory and witness it emerge from the basement via a giant frosted-glass opening cylinder, to the sound of suitable music.
The interior features a control system halfway between BMW's iDrive and a normal array of buttons, plus what is billed as the world's first draught-free air-con. And the engine range lives up to rest of the Phaeton's larger-than-life aura: highlights are a 6.0-litre W12 with 420bhp and a 5.0-litre V10 turbodiesel which delivers 313bhp and an astounding 553lb ft of torque. A petrol 3.2 V6 is also offered, a 4.2-litre V8 and a 'practical' 3.0 TDI V6 diesel; stretched long-wheelbase versions are also offered, and for 2005, all models now have 4MOTION four-wheel drive, self-levelling air suspension and adaptive dampers.
