Posted 08.24.2010

Executive wheels: a luxurious diesel to rival the hybrids

2010 VW Jetta Sportswagen

By Jeff Rundles

When I was first married, just over 25 years ago, my then-wife had a fairly new VW Jetta, a nice one, with the upgraded package, gold in color. At the time people of our age were buying BMW 3s, Audis, Saabs, Volvos, and occasionally Japanese models, but the European cars held sway as the cool thing to have. Foolish me, I bought a Renault, believing that it was a better car than the BMW (it wasn't), and because it was a wagon, what we now call a sport wagon, and I liked the feel and utilitarian use of the vehicle. The Jetta, which had been on the market since 1980, by the mid-1980s was gaining strength alongside of the other Europeans as very nice as, if not quite as expensive, as the others.

We loved that Jetta, except for the fact that 1980's Jettas, and VWs generally, had quite a reputation for the ease of stealing the nice radios. We lost seven of them over three years, three of those stolen from the trunk after we had installed a slide-in/out model radio that could be stashed in the trunk for safekeeping. Didn't matter; upon seeing the radio removed, they broke the window, ripped out the back seat and rummaged in the trunk to get it. I remember this happening one particularly bitter cold evening when my wife was pregnant with our first child. We were having dinner out, and came out of the restaurant to find the window smashed, glass all over the place, and the radio gone. It was a very cold ride home.

I bring this all up to point out that now, at over 30 years on the market, the Jetta has earned the reputation as one of the more venerable and desirable vehicles on the planet. When some of my children were younger, we had a 1990 Jetta that rotated throughout some 9 years of high school, and right now my daughter who was inadvertently along for that cold ride so many years ago pre-birth, is the owner of a very nice Jetta sedan. Like mother, like daughter.

What makes a car venerable, what keeps it on the market for 30 years, of course, is innovation, and VW has mastered that in the latest version of the Jetta. What has set the Jetta apart from all of those ‘80's competitors is that it has remained a very nice, but affordable car. I mean, the BMW 3 series and comparable Audis, which were just a little more than the Jetta 25 years ago, have gone into the stratosphere price-wise, and Saab and Volvo have essentially become a nonentities. Renault left these shores, and good riddance.

The current Jetta is the sixth generation of the model, having debuted in January 2005, and with it they have taken the design up several notches to become a very beautiful car. It is also larger, 101" in wheelbase, compared to just 94" in the original and in the mid-high-90s in the succeeding generations. And while there have been Jetta wagons, or "wagen" in VW speak, over the years, the sportwagen in the 5th generation was not available until 2009 (there is actually a 6th generation of the Jetta underway, although not in the US yet, and the 2010 Sportwagen features the 6th generation look on the front).

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