beware VW turbo repair scham 4457

The timing belt on my Jetta wagon lasts for around 80,000 (I would have to look it up, but it is not 40k). It was only on the pre-2003 models that the belt had to be changed every 40k, and even then they came out with newer belts for the older models which last longer.

It doesn't matter to me. It's ultimately human life on the line, which is priceless, or at least that's the government's mantra. Toyota is too cheap to put side curtain airbags on their cars as standard, or ABS, or any number of things. That speaks alot about their company's philosophy when most of the low end cars they ship don't even have cruise control or ABS, yet they cost about 17,000 dollars. Heck, for about a thousand more I can get a brand new VW Golf turbodiesel. I want to buy into a company that makes me feel good about buying their products, not just because it's good for me but because the company does the right thing with all their cars. The fact is that the Corolla and Civic are predominantly barebones cars, strictly utilitarian, and what little safety features they have as standard are only designed to pbutt lax US crash tests. I cannot feel good about buying a car from a company like that.

And what's that reason? The TDI has high resale value, the reliability is decent, very good in late models. You have bought into that crap about ricemakers having some kind of Midas touch, some kind of superhuman, godlike powers over automobiles. A quick perusal of reality will show you there are plenty of issue with Asian cars. Heck, it turns out the Toyota Prius, one of their flagship cars, can have a softwaere error that kills the car at highway speeds, Toyota cars do have wiring problems occasionally, and Honda is having problems with some of their CVT's making too much noise. No car is perfect. OTOH, Volkswagen's reliability according to sources such as J.B. Power and CR is improving to the point that most get a "good" rating. Many of the problems can be traced to switchover to production of the Jetta at the Puebla plant in Mexico in the late 90's; many TDI's are built in Brazil.

Not true. The performance is about the same as any other economy car.

And the manual TDI's where I live seem to go for less money than the autos, though there are more manual TDI's than many other manual car model options. Manuals just don't sell, regardless of the car.

I don't drive a manual; I don't care for rowing through gears constantly. I also don't need really fast acceleration, so fast the wheels lose traction constantly. Acceleration for cars now days is more than adequate. A 0-60 of around 11 seconds is plenty fast for my needs- I rarely push the car that hard anyways- I don't have the need, and I don't see many people accelerating that fast either. 40-50 years ago that kind of acceleration was reserved for sports cars.