2011 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Nine Month Review and Report
JETTA INTERIOR
The Jetta’s interior is exactly what one would expect to find in a German automobile. The dash itself is oriented towards the driver and the center stack is neat and uncluttered, with big, legible gauges and easy to use knobs and switches for audio and climate control. Even cars without navi get a large LCD display.
The richer, softer materials in the prior generation Jetta have been replaced by not-quite-as-soft plastic, but it’s very good plastic and probably the best in its class, compared to Japanese competitors such as the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic.
Seats, made of faux leather V-Tex, are firm and rather comfortable, providing decent lateral support. Several hours into my drive north of San Francisco, I noticed that I was just about as comfortable and free of back pain as I had been when I had gotten into the vehicle.
The rear seat benefits from the increase in wheelbase and was quite comfortable; from the brief time I spent in the back, it seemed to have the leg and knee room of a larger sedan.
DRIVING THE JETTA
Since my first drive along U.S. 1 in California, I have found the Jetta to be fun to drive. Some purists were worried by the fact that VW replaced the previous-generation Jetta’s multilink rear suspension with a cheaper torsion-beam axle while also substituting hydraulic steering for electric power steering but, having driven the previous Jetta quite extensively as well, I really didn’t notice much of a difference and I tend to be picky about those things. VW engineers simply did a good job here.
The Jetta TDI is not a sports sedan by any means but it’s very responsive to driver inputs, the chassis is well balanced, the ride is just right (not too cushioned, not too bumpy), and the power emanating from the 2.0-liter turbo-diesel engine, which creates 140 hp and 236 pound-feet of torque, gives the car a healthy dose of Fahrvergnügen (incidentally, the word Fahrvergnügen, not a German word, was coined by Volkswagen specifically for use in several U.S. advertising campaigns and joins “Fahr” from fahren, “to drive,” with Vergnügen, “pleasure,” to convey “driving pleasure.”)
Most of the Jetta’s driving has been urban and suburban. It has gotten a steady 30 mpg (7.84 l/100 km) in city driving which is exactly what the EPA rating says it will get. On highway drives, 43 mpg (5.47 l/100 km) is easily achievable and a figure that puts it into Prius v territory (the Prius v gets 44 mpg (5.34 l/100 km).
BOTTOM LINE
For those of us at The Diesel Driver who are regularly in the driver’s seat, driving the Volkswagen Jetta TDI has been a satisfying and entertaining experience. New car buyers are seeing this as well. For the first half of 2011, 22% of Jetta buyers chose the diesel variant as opposed to the gasoline Jettas with a 2.5-liter engine, the SE and SEL models. Now, if only Volkswagen would only give the TDIs a song…
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