[Fitz Ingarage]

I'm not a Jetta owner, but my wife and I are looking at the '09 Jetta SE SportWagen with the 2.5L I-5 and a beloved manual transmission. (It's actually the manual tranny that's put the SportWagen on our list, as we both love manual shifters and they're becoming very rare in this sort of vehicle in the U.S..)

I was reading Consumer Digest at the library and they described the 2.5L I-5 as noisy and unrefined and that at speed the noise grew tiresome. True? My wife briefly test drove the car and didn't notice any of that. Any thoughts are welcome.

We've not much interested in the 2.0L turbo (premium gas) nor the TDI (my arithmetic shows a payback is within the 2nd or 3rd year; diesels come with a new set of concerns).

We love the Jetta's styling, but wonder about the engine and VW's less-than-excellent customer satisfaction scores. The car seemed VERY solid to us. Thanks.

 

[duncanator]

I drove one for a couple of weeks as a rental and it did seem a bit noisy. It ran fine but under moderate to heavy acceleration, it was noisy. One other bad thing was the base stereo. Yuk.

 

[coolbeans]

Howdy,
I have about 300 miles on my 09 Jetta S, and I have not noticed any engine noise through normal acceleration through the gears, or crusing at say, 77mph, for sake of a number. Sure, when you get on it, you get the noise any engine makes at a higher rpm.It's just over a 2.5 hour drive from the dealer to my place, so I had plenty of time to hear different stuff go on with the car. The Bridgstone Turanza EL400's that came on the car make alot more noise than the engine does by far. They must have changed the base radio, as mine sounds pretty good!

 

[Fitz Ingarage]

Thanks for the 2.5 engine thoughts. It seems like a good motor. My wife drove an '09 Jetta SportWagen and said the engine noise was not objectionable at all and that the accelleration with the 5-Speed was akin to our '04 Forester 2.5L. I'll have to take a spin myself and see what I think. I don't expect the quiet of a luxury sedan in a $23K car, but road noise becomes tiresome and matters to us. Good point about tires and their contribution to noise. Our Forester has terrible wind noise; by contrast my '06 Nissan Frontier Crew 6-Speed is extremely quiet at speed.