Kiscica
Member
\"Hill-holder\" feature? Surely not...?
Hi all,
I just got my brand-new, <font color="blue"> indigo blue </font> Jetta Wagon GLS on April 1st, and no fooling
The search here in SoCal was long and frustrating, with dealers disappointing me right and left. I was just about to go out of state to get it when one showed up right in my backyard.
I paid way too much (MSRP) for it but, as the dealer who finally came through for me (Robin at Power VW of Corona) pointed out, her price for that car is $300 over invoice like everyone else's -- when she doesn't have any!
I was beginning to think I'd never be able to get one here, and this one was almost precisely the car I wanted (even down to my and my wife's first choice color and the Monsoon audio -- in an ideal world I would have liked ESP too but I'm not complaining) with nothing I didn't want. It was worth it to me.
It's my first new car -- hell, it's the first car I ever spent more than a few hundred bucks for. (My most recent car was a beat-up 82 diesel Jetta that I acquired by paying off its owner's parking tickets for him... I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of miles it had on it, but it still got close to 50 MPG! Before that I had an '81 Rabbit, and before that a '72 MB 280SE, almost as old as I am!) But there was no question in my mind that my first new car should be a diesel. I learned to drive in Hungary on a diesel Lada (a Soviet car), and the '82 Jetta had served me well, so I already had a soft spot in my heart for the powerplant. That combined with the fact that I have suddenly gone from within biking distance of work to a 130 mi. round-trip commute in an area (LA/Orange County) where gas is currently about 40 cents a gallon more than diesel made an already virtually foregone conclusion all the more unavoidable. The possibility of using biodiesel sealed it for me as I am not too comfortable with contributing 300-odd lbs. of CO2 to global warming with every tank of fuel I burn.
I love this car so far and hope fervently that it doesn't disappoint me, for I would like to keep it for at least 10 years and a correspondingly large number of hundreds of thousands of miles. Maybe that's being too optimistic
but I'm going to try for it. I was quite ambivalent about buying a new car to begin with, but now that I have taken the plunge (and especially given the large number of -- highway -- miles I'm going to be putting on it in the first few years) I feel that I should at least make it last!
OK, enough rambling, here's my question. One thing that Robin happened to mention while we were doing the paperwork puzzled me. She said that she loved this car because "it doesn't roll back when you're starting on a hill." When I pressed for details she said that it had a feature by which you could take your foot off the brake on an incline and the car would stay put until you let out the clutch.
Now, I've never heard of such a thing in a VW. If I recall correctly Subaru, or some other Japanese manufacturer boasted such a "hill-holder" feature at one point, for all I know still do, but it seemed odd to me that none of VW's literature, nor the owner's manual (which I was browsing through in the sales office by that point) mentioned such a thing.
Out of curiosity I went out back and tried letting out the brakes on an incline with the clutch in. Naturally the car rolled back
and that coupled with the fact that I can find no mention of such a feature leads me to believe that she had no idea what she was talking about. But she had insisted that this particular car had this feature and I just wonder where she got the idea from?
One possibility that comes to mind is that, given how the superior low-end torque of the diesel engine makes starting off on an incline relatively painless, she might have just THOUGHT that the car had a hill-holder!
In any case I'm not going to miss the feature myself, though I was hoping it would be easier to persuade my slightly reluctant wife to learn to drive a stick if she knew it wouldn't roll back. She will have as long a commute as I do (in the opposite direction -- we basically split the difference) and I would like to get her into as fuel-efficient a car as possible -- she doesn't want a new car, but we'd love to find a used diesel. And we all know there's no point in getting one of those and then sticking a slushbox on it!
Hi all,
I just got my brand-new, <font color="blue"> indigo blue </font> Jetta Wagon GLS on April 1st, and no fooling
I paid way too much (MSRP) for it but, as the dealer who finally came through for me (Robin at Power VW of Corona) pointed out, her price for that car is $300 over invoice like everyone else's -- when she doesn't have any!
It's my first new car -- hell, it's the first car I ever spent more than a few hundred bucks for. (My most recent car was a beat-up 82 diesel Jetta that I acquired by paying off its owner's parking tickets for him... I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of miles it had on it, but it still got close to 50 MPG! Before that I had an '81 Rabbit, and before that a '72 MB 280SE, almost as old as I am!) But there was no question in my mind that my first new car should be a diesel. I learned to drive in Hungary on a diesel Lada (a Soviet car), and the '82 Jetta had served me well, so I already had a soft spot in my heart for the powerplant. That combined with the fact that I have suddenly gone from within biking distance of work to a 130 mi. round-trip commute in an area (LA/Orange County) where gas is currently about 40 cents a gallon more than diesel made an already virtually foregone conclusion all the more unavoidable. The possibility of using biodiesel sealed it for me as I am not too comfortable with contributing 300-odd lbs. of CO2 to global warming with every tank of fuel I burn.
I love this car so far and hope fervently that it doesn't disappoint me, for I would like to keep it for at least 10 years and a correspondingly large number of hundreds of thousands of miles. Maybe that's being too optimistic
but I'm going to try for it. I was quite ambivalent about buying a new car to begin with, but now that I have taken the plunge (and especially given the large number of -- highway -- miles I'm going to be putting on it in the first few years) I feel that I should at least make it last!OK, enough rambling, here's my question. One thing that Robin happened to mention while we were doing the paperwork puzzled me. She said that she loved this car because "it doesn't roll back when you're starting on a hill." When I pressed for details she said that it had a feature by which you could take your foot off the brake on an incline and the car would stay put until you let out the clutch.
Now, I've never heard of such a thing in a VW. If I recall correctly Subaru, or some other Japanese manufacturer boasted such a "hill-holder" feature at one point, for all I know still do, but it seemed odd to me that none of VW's literature, nor the owner's manual (which I was browsing through in the sales office by that point) mentioned such a thing.
Out of curiosity I went out back and tried letting out the brakes on an incline with the clutch in. Naturally the car rolled back
One possibility that comes to mind is that, given how the superior low-end torque of the diesel engine makes starting off on an incline relatively painless, she might have just THOUGHT that the car had a hill-holder!
In any case I'm not going to miss the feature myself, though I was hoping it would be easier to persuade my slightly reluctant wife to learn to drive a stick if she knew it wouldn't roll back. She will have as long a commute as I do (in the opposite direction -- we basically split the difference) and I would like to get her into as fuel-efficient a car as possible -- she doesn't want a new car, but we'd love to find a used diesel. And we all know there's no point in getting one of those and then sticking a slushbox on it!
