One thing that I've been meaning to blog about for a while has been the "new" car we bought. Before we get into the new one, let's get some background info on why we wanted something different.
We drove our Volvo S40 for a year and put 20,000 miles on it. It was a good car and had no real problems, but we started thinking about giving it up in favor of a vehicle that was cheaper (we hated having a car payment, and we didn't really need a vehicle that was that nice). Plus, I really missed being able to do maintenance on a car and with the warranty on the Volvo we didn't want to risk a warranty issue being denied because of a lack of service records. With the number of miles we put on cars -- with Johnni going back to Iowa every other month :) -- we wanted one that had less room to depreciate.
We started looking for cheap, safe, reliable cars that would work for at least the next couple of years and not be any smaller than the S40 we were giving up. I missed having my '93 BMW so we kicked around the idea of getting a 4-door version of something similar. We also started looking at Volkswagens because they too are German-engineered. The Jetta seemed like a better choice because it was going to be cheaper to buy and cheaper to maintain. Sounded good to us! But which model of the Jetta should we get?
We started looking at the 4-cyl gas version because they're known to be reliable and consistently get 30+ mpg. Sounded pretty good to us, but I thought it would at least be worth a look to consider a diesel version of the same car because they get quite a few more miles per gallon. I ran the numbers and found out that the fuel savings would more than justify the cost differential (Diesel Jettas are more expensive because they get better mileage, last longer, and have a more loyal customer (fan, actually) base). Add to all of that an article I read on Bloomberg.com that predicted the price of diesel fuel to be lower than that of gasoline this summer, and I was convinced.
So, say hello to our '01 Jetta TDI:
We got it at the very end of March with 125k miles, which is "just broken in" according to most TDI owners -- the engines routinely go to 300k without problems. I doubt we'll be able to keep it that long with a growing family (2 dogs and a negative-four(ish) month old baby), but for the next few years it should fit the bill. We've driven it over 5,000 miles in the 2 months since getting it and have averaged 45.4 mpg (50 highway)! Our longest tank has been 721.1 miles before filling up, but we're confident we can push that number to 800 or 900 without trying too hard. That's almost the whole trip back to Iowa on one tank! We started using Fuelly.com to track out fuel consumption/purchases...it's very simple, but is still a pretty neat site. Plus you can get cool html snippets to add to whatever you want:
We took the Jetta on a trip up near Atlanta over Memorial Day weekend (post coming later, probably) and I was pretty excited to see this where we stopped on the way home:
So, there you have our black and green jetta. If you find yourself questioning the green-ness of diesel fuel (it's ok, there's a diesel stigma in America), you may want to check out the article in which the 2009 version of the Jetta TDI was named "Green car of the year" by Green Car Journal. If we were going to buy a NEW car, which we aren't, we would probably go for the Jetta SportWagen TDI...which is a totally awesome vehicle at around $25k.
