1999 Volkswagen Jetta

What a car! 3 different engines offered including a diesel engine and two transmissions make for a very sporty or very frugal ride, depending on how you want to drive it.

I’m going to just go ahead and start off with the bad here so we can get that out of the way. If you do some asking around you will hear about a few main engine related complaints centering around the 4 cylinder engines. The top two complaints would be the timing belt and the mass air flow sensor. Yes, these are two common issues, but for the most part they can be prevented by following the regular maintenance. The first issue is with broken timing belts. This is a regular wear item and should be replaced about every 60,000 miles despite what an owner’s manual or service advisors may tell you. The second would be the mass air flow sensor. The mass air flow sensor is between your air filter and the intake manifold and anything that does make it past your air filter can/will dirty this sensor. These can indeed be cleaned and should be cleaned when you have a tune-up performed, but you may have to ask for this to be done.

Ok, that was the bad news, now let’s get to the truly terrible news. It seems to me that when you buy a VW product you either get a peach of a car that will run well past 250,000 miles with nary a hitch or you get a problem car that will leave you wondering what terrible deeds you did in a past life to deserve this torment! There are troublesome electrical gremlins that confound VW techs, piston rings that can wear out well before 100,000 miles requiring an expensive re-build and factory alarms that seem to have a mind of their own! Because of the parts involved in an engine rebuild or the time to diagnose an electrical problem, expect many hundreds of dollars on up to a few thousand!!

Is it all bad news? No, not really. While virtually every system on the car has serious faults (steering/suspension/ electrical/ transmissions/ engines/ electrical and even the brakes) if you are able to get a car that is one of those peaches, you have one heck of a nice car. The materials used inside the car are light years above its competitors, the handling is very well sorted out and it has a very German, solid feel that you simply can’t find in this class or at this price range.