It was voted European Car of the Year 2006, becoming the first car to win twice and beating the rival Volkswagen Passat by just 5 points.

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.

In essence, the first Passat was a fastback version of the mechanically identical Audi 80 sedan, introduced a year earlier.

At the time it was the first Passat to be built on a Volkswagen-designed platform, rather than sharing one with an Audi saloon.

It was marketed under the Passat name in all markets ; in North America, this was a first.

Its PL45 platform was shared with the first-generation " Typ 8D " Audi A4, which was unveiled 2 years earlier, and saw a return to the Passat sharing its platform with Audi's equivalent model for the first time since the second-generation ( B2 ) Passat, which shared its platform with the second-generation " Typ 81 " Audi 80 / Audi 90 ( the A4 is the successor to the Audi 80 line ).

The Passat introduced a new design language, first seen on the Concept 1 concept car, for the latest generation of Volkswagens such as the Mk4 Golf, Bora and Polo Mk4.

The B6 Passat was first displayed at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2005, and launched in Europe in the summer of 2005.

The Volkswagen Passat was ranked first and the XM took eighth place.

The Audi 100 would be a commercial success, but it would also be the first of a series of front-engined water-cooled Audi based designs from the Volkswagen group that would, starting with the first Passat in 1973, enable the group to survive and flourish once the European and US markets began to lose their appetites for rear-engined air-cooled models.

As Volkswagen started to produce front-wheel-drive water-cooled designs, production ended in 1973 at the Wolfsburg plant, with production moving to VW's new Emden plant, which was later retooled in 1973 to build the first generation Passat ( marketed variously, also as the " Dasher ").

As Volkswagen's last air-cooled sedans and wagons, the Type 4 models were succeeded by the first generation Passat, marketed as the Dasher in the USA.

A modern, front-wheel drive hatchback, it was one of the first such cars in that class, along with the Volkswagen Passat, and became the 1976 European Car of the Year.

The introduction of the Passat VR6 also marked the first time a VR6 powered vehicle was made available in North America before Europe.

In a March 2012 comparison test by Car and Driver, the Sonata came in fourth place out of six cars behind the first place Volkswagen Passat, second place Honda Accord, and third place Kia Optima.

An Audi derived platform, the first Volkswagen Passat was nearly identical to the Audi 80 ( Audi Fox in US ), sharing much of its mechanical systems, including its longitudinal engine placement.

The B3 Volkswagen Passat was the first B platform car to be called Passat in the United States.

The B3 was also the first Passat with an independently designed platform, it did not share parts with Audi models.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.

Being somewhat delicate in health, at the age of sixteen he was sent to Southern Europe, for which he at once developed a passion, so that he spent nearly all of the following ten years abroad, at first in Italy, then in Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Palestine.

He was an ardent champion of the Brown & Sharpe Apprentice Program and personal counselor to countless able men who first developed their industrial talents with the company.

On Thursday, the first day of the Masters, the contest between Palmer and Player developed instantly.

The first major groups of amphibians developed in the Devonian period from lobe-finned fish similar to the modern coelacanth and lungfish, which had evolved multi-jointed leg-like fins with digits that enabled them to crawl along the sea bottom.

The first version of the robot was first developed back in 2003.

Agnostida is an order of arthropod which first developed near the end of the Early Cambrian period and thrived during the Middle Cambrian.

Asteroids is also the first game to use Atari's " QuadraScan " vector-refresh system ; a full-color version known as " Color-QuadraScan " was later developed for games such as Space Duel and Tempest.

It seems that when the Asparagales first diverged they developed simultaneous microsporogenesis, which the ' lower ' Asparagale families retain.

The practices of total war, developed by Sherman in Georgia, the experimental use of the first usable predecessor of the machine gun and of trench warfare around Petersburg, all foreshadowed World War I in Europe.

The first charter of human rights by Cyrus the Great as understood in the Cyrus cylinder is often seen as a reflection of the questions and thoughts expressed by Zarathustra and developed in Zoroastrian schools of thought of the Achaemenid Era of Iranian history.

Since this picture was first developed by Ernst Stueckelberg, and acquired its modern form in Feynman's work, it is called the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation of antiparticles to honor both scientists.

Throughout European history, philosophers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, among others, contemplated the possibility that souls exist in animals, plants, and people ; however, the currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the 19th century by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as " one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first ".

The term Animism appears to have been first developed as animismus by German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl, circa 1720, to refer to the " doctrine that animal life is produced by an immaterial soul.

However, it does seem clear that his first notable work, Summa Quoniam Homines, was completed somewhere between 1155 and 1165, with the most conclusive date being 1160, and likely was developed through his lectures at the school in Paris.

" Ever since the time of my ancestor Ali, the first Imam, that is to say over a period of thirteen hundred years, it has always been the tradition of our family that each Imam chooses his successor at his absolute and unfettered discretion from amongst any of his descendants, whether they be sons or remote male issue and in these circumstances and in view of the fundamentally altered conditions in the world in very recent years due to the great changes which have taken place including the discoveries of atomic science, I am convinced that it is in the best interest of the Shia Muslim Ismailia Community that I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age and who brings a new outlook on life to his office as Imam.

These three propositions were further developed by his followers, who maintained that God revealed Himself in a threefold revelation, the first in the Biblical patriarch Abraham, marking the epoch of the Father ; the second in Jesus Christ, who began the epoch of the Son ; and the third in Amalric and his disciples, who inaugurated the era of the Holy Ghost.

The first sulfonamide and first commercially available antibacterial antibiotic, Prontosil, was developed by a research team led by Gerhard Domagk in 1932 at the Bayer Laboratories of the IG Farben conglomerate in Germany.

After the team had developed a method of purifying penicillin to an effective first stable form in 1940, several clinical trials ensued, and their amazing success inspired the team to develop methods for mass production and mass distribution in 1945.

While Aristotle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Augustinian thinkers.

The Aster CT-80, an early home / personal computer developed by the small Dutch company MCP ( later renamed to Aster Computers ), was sold in its first incarnation as a kit for hobbyists.

Dedicated anti-tank vehicles made their first major appearance in the Second World War as combatants developed effective armored vehicles and tactics.

In 1949, the company developed magnetic recording tape and in 1950, sold the first tape recorder in Japan.

In 1824 to reduce the impact of this destructive electrolytic action on ships hulls, their fastenings and underwater equipment, the Victorian scientist-engineer Sir Humphry Davy, developed the first and still most widely used marine electrolysis protection system.