2006 Volkswagen Jetta review from North America

The Jetta TDI just does not give all that good a gas mileage as one would expect for the significantly greater price we paid for it.

I am not particularly happy with this car, although my wife loves it. We are now at 14,000 miles and have been extremely careful with the break-in process. The dealer gave us the following advice “drive it like you stole it” which was not particularly useful, but we found an excellent set of recommendations on a VW forum on what and how to do the breaking. The car appears to be operating properly, but we still only get roughly 40 mpg in a 5 speed manual. This is the best we get, generally we get in the mid to high 30’s roughly the same as the Saturn SL2 it replaced.

The dealer we purchased from lost the VW franchise less than a month after we purchased the car, we took it to another dealer and were told that we were “short tripping” the car and that it should not be driven on trips of less than 20 miles. That the engine was probably getting clogged with soot (the car generally drives 15 miles or less at around 70MPH). That cleaning the soot is the primary solution which should return the mileage to roughly 50 mpg. The cost of this is roughly $1000 in this area so it seems fairly steep and there is no guarantee that the whole thing will not have to be repeated in a few months (mind we have had the car for only 8 months). We have followed the seconds dealers recommendations of taking the car are long drives (300 miles at 70+ MPG) just to clean the soot. We have gone on several of these, which is a waste of fuel and time since they are not destination drives, we could get the same results by putting the car up on blocks and letting it run.

We like the car for the most part EXCEPT the fuel economy. I am trying to find out whether there might be a problem with the car somehow.