Gadgetory

Volkswagens always been a big hybrid doubter you almost got the feeling they kind of grudgingly brought out the Touareg hybrid and that's where the price was so ridiculous but now they've got a hybrid car worth consideration let's drive this 2013 Jetta Hybrid check the tech and see if they've got the religion now spot and Jetta Hybrid obviously by the badge over here but on the front you see it revives a little more arrow the entire body has been smoothed a little differently and if you lift the trunk you know it's a hybrid there's a big old coffin shape thing back there that's the battery taking up a pretty good amount of your trunk space dead giveaway you get into a Jetta Hybrid even if you don't know it you can tell quickly by that gauge on the left Noatak in these cars a big old evie gauge don't be fooled by the numbers two four six eight ten those are not rpm ranges it's just some goofy thing they put in there to show you how much power you're tapping from the car it takes up a lot of real estate it doesn't tell you a whole lot it's a very traditional boost or charge gauge the usual crunchy 8-bit monochrome thing in the middle that hasn't changed in speedo and other gauges are normal now we get to our head unit in this car we've seen it many times before the difference is when you hit the car button on the hybrid you get to a bunch of energy or battery state displays energy flow shows you when you're charging discharging using gas or electric power zero emissions interesting this will give you all the time slices at which you are giving out zero emissions from the tailpipe and then you've got your usual displays of fuel efficiency over time the key here is to notice that number we've been driving this car around for over 550 miles and we're pushing 40 mpg real world and we are led footed reviewers living in a hilly area called San Francisco so that's actually a very impressive number now the media sources are here on this little phone dial thing it's an interface I've never gotten in love with in fact I hate it Bluetooth streaming right there we do have a nice display of metatags MDI refers to this little portable media interface this little pigtail here in the glove box notice they don't yet have an Apple lightning connector so I've got to use my little adapter and is where it starts to get a little bit nerve-wracking I just know anything is going to snap right off your aux jack is right here next to these buttons SD card slot you're never going to use that radios on a separate menu if so many cars do and you can go through your Sirius satellite stations very quickly it seeks and locks rapidly am/fm no HD radio because we have a high trim Jetta there is a navigation system here within this postage stamp-sized screen we've seen this one before it works fine but again it's kind of burdened by this overall interface on this car that I'm not in love with now your one choice gearbox in the hybrid is a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission this is a very interesting combination but it's the only hybrid car yet that has a hybrid powertrain and a dual clutch transmission you normally find a CVT maybe an automatic you've got your gate over here for shifting as well no paddles on the wheel are available though there's also a sport mode back here I got to have to VW they didn't get lazy when they engineered this car there's a ton of tech in this powertrain 1.4 liter the lady MIDI inline 4 with direct injection and intercooled turbo charging Ford calls that EcoBoost it's the rage in the industry right now coupled with a electric motor that delivers 27 horsepower all combined 170 horse 184 foot-pounds of torque it's this 3,300 pound car to 60 in about eight six eight seven while delivering an estimated forty five average mpg as of our shoot today there's not an official EPA number but compare that to the much lower 34 combined on the TDI Jetta which is no slouch so you got about a third better mileage on this guy that's a serious improvement and all that efficient power goes out through front-wheel drive only there's no all-wheel drive in this Jetta up the hybrid yet and you've also got that one choice of transmission we saw in the cabin it's a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual now let's get on the roads even makes a difference or if VW is just showing off what kooky combinations they can cook up when you're on open road it's actually quite rewarding there's a lot of power a lot of torque in particular on tap and it comes on very consistently a nice big fat flat torque curve as far as I can detect the problem is when you're not on the highway or an open country road and you're kind of going on and off the power you need to do the usual stop and go this car is a disaster it is so unresponsive in typical nibbling traffic that I just wanted to get out of it specifically the creep function when you let off the brake and the car rolls forward is weirdly synthetic so first there's none and all of a sudden the car starts to roll forward like it's got the idle set at 2,000 the other big problem is applying the brakes you seem to get one level of braking and then as you hold the pedal you get another and it's too much like throwing up the anchor and the power comes on in some weird stagey way like the brakes do so it kind of equates to the worst turbo lag on earth even though that's not what's going on I think it's electric motor lag and then combined with that this is not the VW suspension I'm used to maybe it's the additional almost 300 pounds of the battery and electric gear it's throwing off the balance I don't know but this is not my favorite Jetta by a long stretch and in the middle of this mess of non-responsiveness it seems like a waste to plant a 7-speed dual-clutch automated gearbox in the middle of all this hit the e mode button and the car will stay all-electric as long as it can a little over a mile and up to about 45 miles an hour now pricing a Jetta Hybrid is a little annoying to me the bass car is actually the SE at 27 785 delivered now you got to inch your way into basic tech by buying chunky packages you go to SEL for example for another twenty three hundred dollars then they throw you a bone in the form of navigation and a bunch of other niceties then another eighteen hundred dollars get you to SEL premium which is where you got to go to get a backup camera in other words you got to go whole hog to get this car done seen that style just get a Jetta Hybrid SEL premium that includes everything a bunch of tech you definitely need and probably some filigree you don't but that's how they package it 31 975 hora Jetta