Lindsey~*

mzovoce

I saw your post about car seat placement and you mention that you drive a passat wagon. How do you like it? It's on our short list of cars that we are looking at. How's the "trunk" space, we have a very large stroller and it takes up a ton of space.

kirnat848

*butting in* I have a passat wagon and I love it. We have 3 girls and it actually fits all of us perfectly. The trunk is pretty big, we can put a double stroller and more in there, we used it to go to the beach a couple of weeks ago and we were all comfy with all of our stuff in it too. It drives great and gets good gas milage.

mzovoce

How do the general maintenance costs compare, do you know? That's why we're looking to get rid of the Volvo, it's just nickle and diming us to death.

kirnat848

You have to get the synthetic oil changes which cost more but last like 10K miles, so it sort of evens out. Mine is an 07 which we bought used a little over a year ago. I haven't had any real problems with it, I did have a computer malfunction but I just took it to the dealership and it was covered under warranty so no charge to me. I dont know the longterm maintence care yet though, but so far so good!

LindseyJW

i love it! i think repairs are costly, but i have only ever had old clunkers before, so i don't have a solid reference point.

we bought an '02 back in '05 and it was in great condition until the warranty expired this past spring. murphy's law though, right? most of what was wrong was general stuff that had reached it's life expectancy (brake pads, spark plugs, timing belt, etc) - it was just all at the same time. i think the total repair at VW was over $7k. we ended up doing the repairs elsewhere for under $5k.

we have had two computer malfunctions, one of which is extremely costly to repair ($1k) and doesn't affect the functioning of the part which it controls, so we didn't fix it. 

FYI, we have also found the VW dealership repairs to be, on average, about 33% more costly than our local mechanic, who has been fixing my family's cars for 30 years. so after our warranty expired, we started taking it there for repair and mileage service instead of to the dealership.

the car drives very well, gets fairly good mileage and has plenty of space in the trunk and the back seat. we considered the jetta wagon, but the cabin space felt claustrophobic to me. we wanted a wagon to transport our 120lb dog, and she had plenty of room to maneuver in the trunk of the passat, even when we had luggage back there. we have frequently carried two strollers, a large jogging stroller and a maclaren, plus luggage and general trunk junk.