2009 VW Jetta Sportwagen 2.0T Review

2009 VW Jetta Sportwagen 2.0T Review All Jetta Wagons are sport wagons, as if VW wants to head off wagon prejudice at the pass. Let's see what our SEL model has under the hood and in the dash to erase some of that prejudice. Now inside, the first word that comes to mind is "hallelujah" because this is a dramatically new Volkswagen head unit and we needed it. This is actually very impressive. We've got a map display here that is of rather high quality, well-rendered, not the best in the world but well done and everything is very readable. I like that in a nav system, so I'm not staring at it trying to figure out what those little tiny tortured words are. You've also got live traffic on this guy as part of a new service layer from Sirius and yes, Sirius Satellite Radio on this car as well. Hard drive based system, not quite as snappy as I'd like. There's a little bit of delay. Maybe inside the screen's calibrated but nothing really awful. Now, that hard drive also comes into play in the audio system. Of course, you've got the usual radio functions. We do also have on this system the ability to listen to HD radio. But under the media button, things get really interesting. CD, DVD, single-slot because we have a hard drive, SD card is down here. I'm not normally a big fan of those but you might be. Here's our hard drive button to go see what's on the drive and finally, there's this media input. This refers to what they call the MDI connector, which is this guy over here, which I currently have a USB pigtail on and you've also got the aux jack on the front of the console. So, all these stuff comes up under your aux media inputs. Now notice when it comes to ripping to the hard drive. I can play the CD. It will not rip and convert that to a digital format. I can copy my SD card files because they're already MP3's in this case. That’s what that icon means. And as you can see, it's about an 18 or 19GB total capacity available to you. The remaining 10GB or so out of this 30GB drive is being used by the system. And if all those sources aren't enough for you, you’ve also got -- look at this, Bluetooth Streaming Audio, which you can turn on. And you can adjust the sensitivity of your aux input jack. That's nice. Oh, by the way, our optical disc deck up here does also accept DVDs though in kind of an odd way. I'm not able to really get to all my chapters and menus to get past my FBI warning. I mean, that's nice but I get bored with that after a minute or two. Now, sound- wise, I'm very impressed by the audio system in this car, especially since it isn't a huge high-dollar upgrade. We do have 10 speakers in this vehicle because we have the better audio system on an SEL. And also, it's got a lot of good sound in the amps. I don't know the exact specs, they're not revealed but you do have your usual settings here with a nice mid control, which is always important on a better audio system. A great toy we have on this sport wagon is the optional panoramic roof. Now, they're not kidding. A great big glass thing powers back and it's got that little kind of West Elm sun shade down there. But you got a big panel over the rear seats and this great big moving one over the front. Since our Jetta SportWagen is an SEL trim car, it has a 2L turbo 4 putting out 200 horsepower and about 207 foot-pounds of torque. Now, I have to admit, I didn't look at this car's butt before I drove it. So, I had no idea what engine it had. But if I had to guess, I would've said it was a V6. Admittedly not quite the best performing one but that's still high praise for a turbo 4. This six-speed manual gearbox is stuck but for $1,100.00 more, you can get VW's nice DSG dual-clutch automated manual. The ride is as VW’s have always been since they were done right, taught without being hard. And the Jetta remains small enough that it's still just tossable. All right, a Jetta SportWagen SEL with all the good trim's about $26,000.00. Add $1,990.00 for the nav rig with all the cool audio inputs, kind of a must-go CNET style, right? If you want to go cheap, $199.00 alone will get you an iPod adapter in the console. Now, that sunroof is $1,300.00 and if you want the DSG dual-clutch gearbox, it's $1,100.00 more.