after driving our 2005.5 jetta tdi sedan for nine years and 186,000 miles we thought it was time to get another car and loved the gas milease of the diesel but wanted more room so opted for the sportwagen.

we’ve been driving manual transmissions tdis for almost 15 years and in the sedan i could regularly get close to 50mpg which was much higher than the “official” mpg ( which i think was something like 38mpg ) and i was a little nervous that we’d still see that kind of mileage with the wagon which if officially rated at 23 city and 33 hwy.

sure enough after the “break in” period of a few thousand miles i can regularly get higher than 50mpg at speeds between 55-60mph ( it drops to mid to high 40s at higher speeds ).

on a recent trip through rolling hills of the driftless region i managed to get 57.9mpg after driving 90 miles.

and no i wasn’t doing any fancy hypermiling manual transmission moves. pretty amazing. i’m not sure what you with an automatic transmission so can’t say how much of the difference between the official numbers is a result of conservative reporting on volkwagen’s part or my super optimized manual transmission skills.

in the interest of full disclosure, kris took this picture while i was driving 🙂