2001 Volkswagen Jetta GLS review from North America

You need to step on the brake pedal in order to move the transmission from park to drive. I have had a couple of instances where I was not able to get the car in drive. I took the issue to the dealer and was told that this was a recall item, I was not charged anything.

Regular maintenance, oil changes, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs, spark plug wires, etc…

My wife bought this car in 2002 when it had 20K miles on it. We recently got her a new vehicle and I took this car over as a daily driver as there was no need to get rid of it. I have now made my VW GTI my secondary (weekend) vehicle.

It gets decent gas mileage - I am averaging 28 per tank with equal time spent city and highway driving.

It seats four adults comfortably with enough cargo room to bring 4 people to the beach for a long weekend. I can comfortably cruise on the interstate, again with 4 people and a trunk full of gear, at 80 miles an hour with no worries or shaking and rattling.

I have personally performed all of the maintenance on the car following the service manual to the letter. Again, no issues with the exception of the recall item. I recently rolled into 160,000 miles and the engine and transmission are timed like a Swiss clock (a better analogy would be the car runs like it was engineered by Germans).

If I were to be critical about any aspects of this vehicle, I would have liked that it come from the factory with a little more power. Also, the seats are hard to keep clean because of the material used (non leather in my car).

If you want a car that you can abuse and forget about it in a few years, this is probably not the car for you. You will probably want to get a Honda or Toyota that will get 150K miles with no maintenance at all. If you don’t mind lifting the hood or getting on a creeper, I don’t see why you cannot get 300K out of the engine and transmission. Very well built auto.