Diesel engines in passenger cars have long been problematic in China. Many large Chinese cities, including the capital Beijing, ban diesel-powered passenger cars within the city limits because diesel is considered a dirty kind of fuel only suitable for trucks and buses.
Still, in the early 2000’s, several car makers launched diesels in China, pointing at the low fuel consumption and low greenhouse emissions. A well-known local diesel proponent was Hawtai, which developed its own 2.0 turbo diesel engines. From the foreign side there was really just one car maker that was serious about diesel, and that was, no surprise, Volkswagen. In 2002 the Germans launched a diesel-powered variant of their popular Jetta sedan, made by the FAW-Volkswagen joint venture.
The diesel powered Jetta was called ‘Jetta SDI’. SDI is an English abbreviation that stands for Suction Diesel Injection. The SDI name was used for a series of naturally aspirated direct injection diesel engines developed by Volkswagen for cars, vans, and even boats.
The Jetta SDI was billed as the “first passenger car in China equipped with a modern foreign diesel engine”. It passed the then-valid Chinese automobile environmental protection regulations with ease. The Jetta SDI was made for a very long term, production ended only in 2012.
At the time, Volkswagen said a diesel engine had a lot of advantages over a petrol engine: a diesel has 15-20% lower fuel costs than a petrol engine, a diesel has a long service life and low maintenance costs, a diesel has a “strong environmental protection adaptability” because it uses less fuel and therefore emits less, and a diesel emits less carbon dioxide to begin with, a diesel makes less noise so the “comfort level” improved, and finally; a diesel is a high technological piece of machinery, and that looks good on the car and thus on the owner.
The noise, however, was a bit of a thing. Apparently, marketeers at FAW-Volkswagen thought the diesel engine was too noisy for the Chinese market, and therefore the engineers added an extra layer of sound insulation. This was unique for the China-made Jetta diesel!
The Jetta SDI came in two trim levels: CDX and GDF, and there was a special base-version for taxi fleets as well. It was standard equipped with sporty ‘BBS’ wheels, black trim all around, and with bumpers painted in body color.
The early Jetta SDI cars got a super cool English badge: Jetta 1.9 Diesel, and that refers to the engine: a 1.9 liter naturally aspirated unit, good 63 hp and 125 Nm. The engine was mated to a five-speed manual gearbox. Output was pretty low, but max torque was available from only 2200 rpm. That didn’t help much for speed; 0-100 took 18.2 seconds and top speed was 150 km/h.
For comparison, a temporarily petrol-powered Jetta with a naturally aspirated 1.6 under the bonnet, did 0-100 in 13 seconds and topped out at 175. The biggest positive for the diesel was fuel consumption, which at the time was measured at a constant speed of 90 km/h. At that speed, the Jetta 1.9 diesel consumed 4.6 liters per 100 kilometers and the 1.6 petrol 5.6. That’s a full liter more. The CD player was factory standard, and the SDI was also equipped with airbags for the driver and for the passenger in front, ABS, and power windows.
The Jetta SDI had sporty white dials. Note the low-rev rev counter.
The 1.9 liter SDI diesel engine was quite large, there wasn’t much space left under the bonnet! To get the emissions as down to where they were, the Jetta SDI was fitted with a catalytic converter that was imported from Germany. At the time, FAW-VW was unable to make this then-advanced device themselves.
Price wise, the diesel powered Jetta was just a little bit more expensive than the petrol-powered versions. In 2004, the base diesel went for 97.800 yuan and the base petrol for 95.800 yuan.
To impress the media with the SDI’s fuel consumption, FAW organized a long test drive for automotive journalists in 2004. The event was poetically called ‘One Tank of Oil Crossing a Thousand Miles of No Man’s Land Challenge’. The trip was in the far north of China and went through the Dongbei, to Inner Mongolia and finally to Hebei, visiting the cities Changchun, Shenyang, Harbin, Dalian, Hohhot and Shijiazhuang.
In early 2008 Volkswagen did another such event, now with an updated Jetta. Note the new grille, bumpers, and alloys. It had FAW and VW logo stickers on the bonnet and a Jetta SDI sticker on the fender. In 2008, the event was called ‘Green Olympic Challenge 2008-FAW-Volkswagen Jetta Diesel Car Thousand Miles of Grassland Crossing Challenge’. The name refers to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, which where sometimes billed as the ‘Green Olympics’.
This is the taxi version of the Jetta SDI. It was a very basic model with unpainted bumpers and simple steel wheels. Marketing the SDI as a taxi made sense, taxis drive long hours and every fen counts. But there were some problems. In the mid-2000’s there weren’t many gas stations that actually sold diesel. In Beijing, for example, diesel was only sold at gas stations outside of the 4th Ring Road, which was then the de facto city limit (it is the Sixth Ring now). That is not very nice for a taxi driver as most customers wold be inside the 4th Ring.
But in other cities the diesel taxi’s worked very well. In 2010, Chinese media published a story about taxi driver Chen Kunyun, living in Kunming, capital of Chengdu Province. He got his Jetta SDI taxi in 2002 and by 2010 he had run 775,000 kilometers with it, without any major problems, according to Chen. He lauded the diesel for its long operating time between fuel stops, saying that every hour a taxi doesn’t operate, he’d loose 30 yuan in income.
In 2012 the 1.9 liter diesel engine became too way old and Volkswagen cancelled the Jetta SDI. There was no diesel successor, wisely perhaps, as only two years later the infamous diesel scandal began. This scandal had a deep impact in China and convinced the Chinese government once more that diesel really was not a suitable fuel for passenger cars.
For a short while, FAW-Volkswagen also sold a diesel version of the Bora sedan. More on that car in my next post!