VOLKSWAGEN Jetta Review

To our surprise, the Jetta appears to provide a little more comfort than the Golf. Which is, of course, a bit on the strange side considering that beside a different suspension setup and weight, the two are almost identical. We are of course talking about the suspension comfort, since everything else that can influence it is configurable.

Beside some pretty good handling the rear multilink setup can also provide a nice, comfy ride. It can soak up almost any road imperfection as long as we're not talking about off-roading or actual asphalt craters. The ride is sporty but not bouncy, and the added weight in the rear can make it a little more stable than the Golf at higher speeds.

Although our car wasn't equipped with the optional shell-like sports seats, the seating arrangement is firm in true Germanic nature and the lateral support is more than adequate. The interior features would be best noted as average, since our test car wasn't fully equipped with Volkswagen's latest comfort options. Although completely unneeded in the desert-like weather we drove the car, we had the optional three-stage heated front seats, which could provide a nice place for your tooshie in those cold winter mornings when you have to drive to work.

Considering this isn't exactly a premium compact sedan, teh Jetta also benefits from a pretty good acoustic comfort. This is most likely thanks to the gasoline engine, which isn;t very intrusive from this point of view as long as you don't over rev it (which we did more than once just to hear the high-pitched notes).

As we mentioned before, and is probably common knowledge by now, the Jetta shares almost all of its underpinnings with the architecture of the Volkswagen Golf V. Talking about its technical bits is therefore pretty much like describing a "Golf with a tail", as some people call it.

The highly-touted TSI engines began appearing on some Volkswagen models about three years ago, first on the Golf, and then on the rest of the compact range. On the course of these years they also made their appearance on the Jetta, in different configurations. Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to drive the "twincharger" version, but the 122 horsepower one, which delivers these figures with the help of "only a puny" turbocharger.

Even so, the compact turbocharged four-cylinder deliver quite an impressive surge of torque from low down on the rpm scale, while the fuel economy isn't half bad. Considering the conditions of our short test drive, we didn't get to fully acknowledge its entire attributes and/or downsides, but we can honestly say this is quite a small marvel of modern engineering.

The 200 Nm (147.5 lb ft) of torque could as well belong to a two-liter normally-aspirated engine, while the fuel economy appears to be that of a 1.6 liter from the same category of intake. Unlike its higher-powered sibling, the "T" in the "TSI" version we experienced doesn't stand for "Twincharged" but for "turbocharged" , while the "S" and the "I" stand for "stratified injection. That is all of course a fancy name for a directly-injected turbocharged engine, whose benefits go well beyond the marketing.

As for the gadgetry found on the car we tested, as you're probably expecting from the interior pictures, the list isn't very long. We didn't benefit from the intelligence of a double-clutch DSG gearbox, nor from the visibility given by the optional HID headlights. No wonderful RNS 510 infotainment system with touch screen either, although the audio unit we had wasn't half bad either.

Now let's see what our car actually had. Pretty much everything we're going to mention could be considered as only half of a what a great gadget actually is. For example, the audio system was way above average, but knowing you could upgrade to a near-perfect RNS 510 unit can really make it look and feel cheap.

The steering wheel could be manually adjusted in height and had buttons for controlling either the audio or the onboard computer, while all the power windows had an "automatic" function. As we mentioned before, the dual-zone climate control system is more like a compromise between a manual air-con and an automatic one. Also, although it didn't help us one bit in the hot summer day on which we drove the car, the front seats were three-stage electrically heated.

On the whole, the Jetta 1.4 TSI we tested was far from lacking the normal or decent gadget features you would expect from a modern compact sedan, but it didn't actually impress us to bits. Thankfully, for the ones interested, the options list is rather long (as with most German cars), which means you can configure it with almost anything imaginable on a car in its class.

From the ten different chapters in this test drive, the safety one is probably gonna be the trickiest one to write. Why is that, you ask? Well, in case you didn't find out by now, our test car wasn't exactly your average Volkswagen Jetta from the dealer lot, like all of the cars we drive are. It had two "small glitches" in the active safety department. If you can call non-functional ABS and ESP systems "small glitches", that is.

Obviously, an internal struggle was carried in order to decide the final score for this chapter, considering the aforementioned information. You see, the Volkswagen Jetta per se is pretty far from being an unsafe car. On both American crash test organizations (the NHTSA and the IIHS) the Jetta has scored maximum or close to maximum points, while its platform siblings all achieved the maximum of five stars at EuroNCAP.

That should pretty much cover the passive safety, but what about the active one? Well, in our example it isn't very good, obviously. We've tested cars cars without ESP before, but all of them at least had a working ABS unit, which is pretty friggin' important, we reckon. The Jetta we tested didn't even have that. So, what to do, what to do?

Well, after some careful consideration and a brainstorming session transformed in a Tequila party, we reached an agreement. The final safety score would be an average between what the car would have scored with the aforementioned systems in perfect working order and what it would score if all Jettas didn't have ESP nor ABS. Taking into account the crash test scores and its number of airbags, the Jetta would have gotten eight out of ten points. A car with all that but with no ABS and ESP would probably get half of that, which is four out of ten.

Well, there you have it. The final average is six points out of ten for the Jetta we tested. Not a great score, but we were constrained by the out of the ordinary situation to proceed like this. The Jetta might be a safe automobile in general but our test car didn't actually share the same traits.

Honestly, the Volkswagen Jetta isn't quite the greatest-looking sedan in the world, but it's not ugly either. Boring and numb yes, but it's not downright ugly. This is actually a great quality in some people's minds. Yes, numbness can be a quality of design sometimes. More people than you'd think actually appreciate not standing out from the crowd and enjoy the the intrinsic qualities of a car rather than its capacity to bring its owner into the spotlight. This is probably the main quality of the Jetta. It's a "politically correct" compact family sedan which offers the basics and doesn't stand out.

The worst part about our test car was obviously the non-working ABS and ESP units, but we would rather speak about the Jetta 1.4 TSI in general when it comes to this model's main downside. What we all unanimously observed during our short test drive was the car's inability to stand out as a better buy in front of its TDI siblings. Sure, the 1.4 TSI engine is quite the engineering marvel for its petite size, but only when we're comparing it with a similarly powerful gasoline engine. The fact is in its single-turbo 122 horsepower form, the 1.4 TSI doesn't really strike out as the better choice when it comes to fuel economy, nor does it offer a more pleasurable drive. It only becomes more pleasurable to drive if you do it in a very non-economical manner, thus compromising its fuel efficiency.

The ugly part about the Volkswagen Jetta 1.4 TSI is probably its contradicting design. It looks like a blinged-out Golf V from the front, while the rest of the car is trying too much to resemble the Passat. The result is almost like a bad Chinese VW Passat replica, which is anything but flattering to either model.