Volkswagen Jetta TDI – Third month.

4750km in fourteen days – that’s what our Jetta TDI did this Christmas. I always drive down to Kerala for the holidays and it involves 850km of driving on the first day from Pune to Bangalore, and 550km the next, Bangalore to Mundakayam. This aside from the couple of trips to Goa and plenty of trips to Mumbai, so let me tell you why the Jetta TDI is such a popular highway car.
The horns and lights are superb. Leaving Pune at 4am, the headlights are powerful enough to let you maintain a decent clip on unlit highways and I love the cornering function that the new Xenon lamps that this facelifted Jetta Highline has. Great light in the dark means I can leave early and be quite far away from Pune by the time the sun comes up. That horn is also fantastic. I find it is just the right tone not to be annoying but loud enough to be overheard by the driver of a noisy, wheezing lorry.
I love its flat, composed ride and there’s this theory I have about this. Cars that float about at high speeds are tiring to drive cross-country because you don’t realise how much you are hanging on against the float. When a car stays flat over everything it drives over, you move about less and you tire less easily. A stable chassis also means you can maintain higher speeds through the wide open corners of NH4, so your average speed stays up and you get to your destination faster.

I love this engine’s torque and I love the six-speed manual. Because it pulls so well and because it easily gets to triple digit speeds, it helps you achieve good average speeds. The shift action from the manual is lovely and I only wish it wouldn’t stall so easily when you start off – hill starts are tricky because you do end up having to slip the clutch a bit.
The Volkswagen Jetta TDI’s boot is huge. On the way back, there were four of us in the car from Bangalore to Pune and the Jetta’s boot swallowed all our holiday packing and still had enough power to feel punchy on the highway. It’s also impressive that the on-board computer was showing between 13.8-15kmpl while fully loaded.
What made me a bit nervous is the fact that the Jetta comes with a space-saver spare wheel and it foxes me because the spare wheel well has enough space to carry a full-size spare. I think the pre-facelift car also came with a full-size spare wheel. I think VW might call it weight saving, I think I’ll call it cost cutting.
Thankfully, I didn’t have a single puncture on the whole trip and aside from a minor wheel balancing issue (which was fixed in Kerala), there were no other problems. Back in Pune and the odo is now reading 15,200km. I’ve booked it in for its first service. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Ouseph Chacko (@ousephchacko)