For a variety of reasons, we decided that we needed another car. And without a whole lot of detailed analysis, we decided that it should be:
- Fuel efficient
- A hatchback, or at least have folding rear seats
- Comfortable to drive on the freeway
- Manual transmission
- Safe
- New
Manual transmission was also widely available, at least from the manufacturer. Hatchbacks are also pretty common.
EPA fuel efficiency was easy enough to find, but I don't have much faith in them. The test methodology seems prone to gaming, and once you're in the high 30s the units make it sound more impressive than it really is.
"Comfortable on the freeway" was another one that was hard to determine, but these being new cars, we figured it was safe to take an innocent-until-proven-guilty approach here. Good acceleration at highway speeds was important, though.
Choosing a car
With these metrics in mind, I started making a table of cars to consider. It was going to be an objective comparison with thorough research, but after a while I realized that really I just wanted the TDI Golf.
It looks good, it's a nice German brand (the specific car we bought was made in Germany), and it's a diesel! I am actually quite enamored of the diesel engine, both philosophically and practically:
- Does away with the throttle, which seems like a silly mechanism for controlling output in the modern electronic world.
- On the other hand, many of the new Toyotas have dual VVT, which is pretty cool and does redeem gasoline engines on this front.
- Without knock to worry about, you can push the compression ratio, which increases efficiency and IMEP.
- Gasoline engines can compensate for lower torque by going to higher engine speeds, but I don't drive in a way that truly takes advantage of that.
- Along those lines, you can use a turbocharger, and anything that uses exhaust enthalpy is nice.
- Allows a more flexible range of alternative fuels, such as transesterified waste vegetable oil or Fischer-Tropsch liquids.
We started the day ("today" according to the post date) with some research in hand - I'd gotten quotes from 6 nearby dealers over the Internet or phone for the 2011 MT Golf TDI, and lowest offer was $22.3K for a black 4-door. Over all the dealers, there were two other cars under $23K.
We went to the $22.3K dealer first (they were having a promotion, offering $3K below MSRP). One salesman accompanied me for the test drive (in which I, embarrassingly enough, stalled the car 5 times), and he was easygoing, nice to talk to, and genuinely excited about the car's features. But then he handed us off to another salesman, whose first words to us (while sipping on a Red Bull) were, "So what can I do to get you to buy this car right now?". Later on, he also tried to pull a "Oh yeah, you do know that $500 of that $3K discount is a loyalty bonus for repeat VW owners only, right?".
After visiting another dealer, we decided that we specifically wanted the white 4-door model and started calling around. Very few dealers had this in stock, and those who did weren't willing to go under $23K. We even increased our dealer circle up to include 10 total. That first dealer (with the $22.3K black 4-door) had mentioned they could do something about the color, but the lowest he could go on that was $22.7K. And when we were leaving, one of the managers pulled some theatrics to try to sell us the black car.
A different dealer was able to get a white 4-door for $22.4K (a dealer trade from Chico), and since this was the model we wanted at the lowest price we had found, we showed up, signed some paper, and bought a car! We had to do some financing to take advantage of a rebate offered by VW Credit. With taxes and fees it came out to $24.5K.
This dealer had a great guy doing Internet sales (he said that Internet sales is the wave of the future, and he was selling ~30 cars/month) whose straightforward attitude was a welcome contrast to the sleaziness of the other dealership.
Aftermath
For about a week afterwards, I was getting calls from car salesmen (as they were invariably male) and bits of spam email from the dealerships.
We've been really enjoying the car, though!
The mileage is great: 47 mpg to Yosemite and back, 46 mpg from SF to San Diego to SF to LA, and 43 mpg commuting to work for a week. If comparing these numbers to gasoline fuel economy, remember that diesel fuel is about 10% denser than gasoline, so a gallon of diesel has 10% greater energy content than a gallon of gasoline.
The turbo is great for hills - it significantly extends the dynamic range of the engine output without making it terribly inefficient at partial loads. If you're already around 2000 rpm, there's not a noticeable lag, just a smoothing of the step command, which feels nicer than my awkward "pop down into a lower gear at 5000 rpm" maneuvers in the G20. If you start slightly slower, then you'll notice when the turbo kicks in, and then find that you need to let up on the accelerator to maintain the same power output. And if you start below 1500 rpm, it feels like you have no torque at all. So the turbo took some getting used to.
The clutch is also very different from what I'm used to, and I stalled a lot in the first week or so. And stalling the diesel is a more dramatic event - there's more inertia to the crankshaft and it feels like it stops more suddenly.
The ride and the interior are pretty great. Much quieter than the G20, though there is more engine noise than the gasoline Golf. Climate control knobs are a little weird, but the radio is pretty well setup. And I've discovered that Bluetooth is quite a useful feature. However, the cargo capacity is not quite what I hoped it'd be, even with seats folded down. Definitely easier to get to, and a larger contiguous space than the G20, but I think the overall cargo volume may be smaller.
Ultimately, though, we're quite happy with the car and the process of buying it. I think reducing our search space was an important factor in that outcome.
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