Hi Pat,

BlueMotion is Volkswagen’s buzzword for its most fuel-efficient vehicles, but there’s a difference between a full-on BlueMotion model – of which there have been three so far, in the shape of a Polo, a Golf and a Passat – and cars with BlueMotion Technology (often abbreviated to BMT), which use fuel-saving learnings from the full BlueMotion cars but in a more cost-efficient way.

PS is the abbreviation for the German word ‘pferdestarke’, which translates as horsepower. It’s a metric measurement, which means it is ever so slightly different to imperial horsepower, or bhp – you typically take a PS figure and multiply it by 0.9864 to get the equivalent bhp: so a 115PS (or hp) Passat would develop 113.4bhp.

BE has us somewhat stumped – various generations of Passat have internal development codes running from ‘B1’ (the original Passat of 1972) to ‘B8’ (the current Passat that has been on sale since 2015), so maybe it’s just a typographical of someone trying to write ‘B3’ for the third-generation model (1988-1996).