I drove up to Alexandria, VA to purchase a 2010 Jetta SportWagen TDI. It's too early to give a comprehensive review of the car, but I'm impressed so far in the 200 miles I've driven in it.
The Jetta has excellent road manners and felt very stable and smooth on the highway. In traffic, it drives a bit different that the cars I'm used to. The TDI has a lot of torque which means you can use a very light touch when starting from a stop. It's not a sports car, but if you hit the accelerator, it moves briskly (with maybe a touch of turbo lag). The DSG transmission is very nice and anticipates the next shift very well (up and down). If you punch it, the tranny is ready to go. If you drive casually, it responds with smoothly spaced shifts.
The interior is quieter than I would have thought and if you have the windows up, you hardly hear the engine at highway speeds. At idle, it sounds different than a gasoline car but no louder than most.
The interior is fairly spartan and simply laid out. It has a mix of automatic and power features (e.g. seat recline is power, but other axes are manual). If you like a lot of gadgets and interior bling, this is not your car. There is a fairly large radio display in the center of the dash. Definitely big enough for a navigation screen (an option I did not purchase). I haven't had a chance to try out some of the more advanced features (Bluetooth integration, media cards, iPod dock).
Best of all, the mileage lives up to the hype. Driving reasonably in a mix of city (DC traffic) and highway (I-66 to I-81 to Roanoke), it got 40 MPG. I've read online that the mileage improves as the engine breaks in, but if we get 35-40 MPG in our mix of driving, that will be more than double what we get in the Silver Surfer.
More to follow after we start to put some miles on it.
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