Brought the Jetta back to the dealership today, terminating the lease a couple of weeks early… it’s already paid for and some might thing it foolish to not keep it around the last couple of weeks, but having three cars on my insurance cranked it up a bunch of money. Not to mention that it was already low on gas – why bother filling it? Having a 6-speed has been fun but it is a VR6 and gas is rather pricy. Not to mention that I had the inspection this week… why wait? Besides, the dealership was happy to have it back, anyway: the thing had under 17,500 miles (after 36 months) and was in good shape, aside from the scratch on the passenger wheel well, complete with an entire log of maintenance records. Someone that works for that dealership is going to be happy to get that car at wholesale!

Is it odd or ironic that the smoothest trip to this dealership was the trip where I return the car?

I had a chance to check out the 06/07 Passat and Jetta as well as the GTI and Eos, while I was there. The Eos is pretty freakin’ sharp, but also pretty freakin’ expensive, topping out at $30K – what’s the Audi TT going for these days? The GTI is still fun but it’s still got bad visibility – in my opinion – and is still pricy for its size. The Jetta in the showroom was over $27K and it was not the top of the line. It was posh, but nothing in it really made me say “hey, I want to spend $4K more than I did in 2003 for it” which says quite a lot. The Passat, on the other hand, was very well done. Nice interior, killer leather seats, one of them funky “stick the whole key in the dash” things, and more bells and whistles than I expected. But again, with that trim, it approaches $30K.

Over all I’m still a VW fan, but it’s getting harder and harder to afford them. I dunno if the flirtation with the Phaeton had anything to do with it, but honestly: what the hell are they thinking? The $30K Passat has got to be as much as the A4 from Audi… and wouldn’t you rather have the rings (and typically better customer service from a better dealership) than the VW? I just think they’re pricing themselves out of their core market. Yeah, the MINI Cooper is still pricy, but they include three years of all maintenance and a bunch of other stuff for their base price that VW doesn’t. And what’s worse is that I’m not even comparing the VW pricing against the MINI pricing – I’m comparing it against VW of just a couple of years ago with almost the same feature set.

*shrug* Not my battle to wage any more, now that I’m out of the product line I guess… I have at least another 34 month before I have to “worry” about another new lease… maybe by then the Jetta will be made in Germany [rather than Mexico] and worth the $27K.

Having seen the current numbers and the trendy, I think my ass will continue to sit in the English built for a lease after this one…