clean97z

Ours was cheaper then the 2.0t model which was our other choice. I believe it started at around 20K msrp. We were able to get the dealer to drop 1500 below MSRP on a package 2 TDI. I thought it was a good price and the fact my wife went from spending 250+/month on gas in our SUV to about 110 or less is awesome! I also like the duramax and it would be the only way I would buy a pickup but talk about paying a premium. They do pretty good on the gas, my buddy averages around 20-21mpg.

My wife and I picked up a 2006 Jetta TDI with the DSG a few months back. Our lowest average fuel economy since we bought the car has been 41mpg. We do a good variety of city/highway driving, my wifes drive to work includes a decent amount of stop and go. We have had one long trip where we average 49mpg. I know the numbers say ~10sec to 60 but it has plenty of acceleration, it has no problem getting on the highway and in the end we didn't buy it to be sports car. I did manually calculate all the fuel economy numbers and I don't rely on the multi-function display. I would recommend this car to anyone who wants great mileage. It's as roomy as the previous generation passat and has an interior that looks like it came out of an Audi.

You should consider the Jetta diesel. The interior size is similar to the previous generation Passat. Plus you get 40+mpg. We got ours with DSG transmission and haven't gotten less then 41mpg on combined city/highway. This wasn't using the trip computer either, I did the math.

I work in a very large medical company were they throw around words like kaizen, lean manufacturing etc... I'm on the engineering end and always laugh when some big exec throws out some ludcrious completion date. If design freeze is like ours, everything is developed by the time it starts with only minor tweaks to product and the actual equipment. To reach design freeze could take 2 or more years. I would be more interested in the time it takes from the drawing board to actually producing cars. We should also remember Toyota isn't making any brand new vehicles, it is just tweaks on an existing design, and really just a bunch of boring vehicles. Also trying to rush a product into production you run the risk of recalls because somewhere along the line somebody cut a corner to save their ass from missing a deadline. It takes a pretty thorough document control system to prevent this. It becomes even harder when you have multiple plants producing the same product.