Why the Volkswagon TDI is great
Aug 30th, 2007 by Vinny
I have a ’99 Volkswagen Jetta with a TDI diesel engine. I have owned this car for about 2 years since 94,000 miles, and it now has 157,000 miles (yeah I drive quite a bit).
Why it’s great:
- Has lots of power. With a chip installed my little engine has over 100 horse power! The more important measurement, it has 200 ft-lbs of torque. With that much torque and a very light car, it moves pretty quick. It is also a manual transmission which gives greater control.
- Great gas mileage. On average I get about 42-45 miles per gallon of diesel. If I drive 78 mph its closer to 42 mpg. If I drive 65 mph, I get closer to 50 mpg, but that is too slow. Automatic transmissions will get slightly lower mpg because of the torque converter loss.
- Low maintenance costs. It only needs an oil change about every 10,000 miles with synthetic oil. The occasional fuel, oil, and cabin filters are about it. The main maintenance item it the timing belt, which with a manual transmission is every 60,000 miles. The cost for this is quite high, about $1000 at the dealer.
- I have a gripe to pick with my Volkswagen dealer. They used to let you just change the timing belt, at about $800. Now they don’t offer that, they only let you get the maintenance package, which comes with a ton of other things like brake fluid change, coolant change, all your filters, oil, etc. Since I am a nerd I do most of that myself. The timing belt requires a lot of tools and time which I didn’t want or have. Be careful when going to smaller shops that say they can change the timing belt, it is very involved (un-mounting the engine) and needs tools to keep the shafts from moving.
- Great resources on the WWW. There is just about everything you can think of on this engine on the web. The best site around for TDI things is http://www.tdiclub.com/ which has a great FAQ section on how to do a lot of maintenance and performance updates. There are great people in the forums that can help with just about any issue you are having. Some of them will even do the timing belt swap for a smaller fee than the dealer.
You can usually find some older models on sale online and locally, but they don’t hang around for long. The engines will last upwards of 200,000 miles, so take care of it!
