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Rating

Verdict So boring you want to die

At my old school, detention usually involved being asked to write a 1,000-word essay about the inside of a ping-pong ball. And because I spent every Saturday afternoon for five years writing about the precise chemical breakdown of air, it’s a breeze to fill these pages with prose about what is unquestionably the most boring car in the whole of human history.

I’d love to meet the man who styled the exterior, to find out if he’d done it as some sort of a joke. But mostly I’d like to meet the man who simply didn’t bother at all with the interior. Because looking at that dashboard gives you some idea of what it might be like to be dead.

Then there’s the engine. This is the 2 litre direct injection jobbie you find in various other VWs and Audis and it’s normally not bad. But the Jetta seems to suck all the life out of it.

What I’m most interested in is why on earth this car was made in the first place, because it’s actually a Golf with a boot. Or to put it another way, a Golf that’s a bit uglier, a bit heavier, a bit slower, a bit less practical, a bit less economical and a lot more boring to drive.

Yet, with options, the model I drove cost £18,500. And to that you must add £1,200 for an automatic gearbox and £1,675 if you want leather upholstery. Anyway, my point is that the Jetta is a £21,000 car. So why not buy a bigger, better and (marginally) more interesting Passat instead?

What really pisses me off about the Jetta is that Volkswagen has the flair and the panache to make the Bugatti Veyron, and we know it can make a Golf saloon interesting because it has proved it with various Seats and Skodas.

But what Volkswagen has come up with here is an automotive Belgium. I therefore cannot recommend it to you in any way.

Price when tested (Feb 2006) £16,625 Model discontinued

Engine 1984cc, four cylinders

Power 148bhp @ 6000rpm

Torque 147 lb ft @ 3500pm

Transmission Six-speed manual

Fuel/CO2 34.4mpg (combined) / 197g/km

Top speed 131mph

0-62mph: 9.2sec