2009 VW Jetta SportWagon Video

2009 VW Jetta SportWagon Video Transcript

^B00:00:00 [ Music ]

>> The VW's going kind of retro with our SportWagon because well, it's called a Sport Vagon [phonetic]. It's got a real Teutonic flavor in the name, which clearly is indicating to us this is a Teutonic driving experience. Let's see about that. ^M00:00:16 [ Music ] Our vagon comes base with a 2.5-liter, inline-5 gas engine. That's kind of generous capacity for a car in this price range, especially as a base motor. Horsepower is 170. Torque is 177. You're looking at 21, 29 EPA mileage numbers. The power comes on pretty well. It's not a performance car, per say, but it's no wimp either. The power squirts out, in our case, through an automatic transmission that is optional, 6-speed with a tiptronic shifting gate over here on the right. You'll wanna select your own gears. I preferred to go into the sport mode, which is one notch back. Right there. It does its job well. It locks you out of overdrive, and it raises the shift point on the remaining five cogs. Head unit in our car is a base rig AM-FM in-dash six, MP3, disc-compatible - not WMA, by the way - satellite radio compatible, so that's an easy add-on, ten speakers, kind of a generous allotment there. But if you bump it up to the big kahuna, navigation entertainment head unit, that's gonna add in a number of features. Obviously, navigation with a 6.5 inch touch screen, hard drive, 30-gig drive with 20-gig available to you to put media on, that's a nice upgrade to some previous low-end VW head units we have not been impressed with. Oh, by the way, that navigation head unit is also going to add WMA disc compatibility to the MP3 we have on our standard unit, plus you get an SD card slot, and also DVD Video playback. So it's got a lot of tricks when you go to the navigation unit. But you do give up five of your six discs, and you can't get an iPod adaptor with Nav. So you gotta make an awkward choice there. Now, unfortunately, and really because of our price point, there's a fairly long list of can't haves on this car. Bluetooth hands-free, pfft. How about rear view camera, pfft. Maybe we can get our hands on a rear seat entertainment system. It's a wagon, after all. No. If you're looking at one of these cars, take advantage of the fact that it's a wagon with a great big piece of sheet metal overhead by getting that replaced with a panoramic sunroof. That is a lot of real estate open to the sky. One gripe we've heard, though, is that the cloth screen that semi-closes it doesn't block quite enough sun, so bring a hat. ^M00:02:40 [ Music ] All right, let's price our SportWagon. This guy starts very reasonably, under $21,000.00. That's with a five-speed manual, but that biggish 2.5-liter inline-5. Now, that's with a fairly basic audio system. You're gonna want to add the nav rig with that user addressable hard drive and all the other nice features, like that multimedia interface. That's gonna set you back almost $2,000.00. The sunroof is also pretty hot for 1,300 bucks. ^M00:03:08 [ Music ]