Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Angel
GM is benchmarking the price of the TDI Jetta. With an automatic transmission the Jetta TDI costs about $900 less than the Cruze TD; GM justifies the difference by including lots of additional features, like a leather interior.
The Cruze TD has two major flaws:
1. It is offered as a loaded line topping model only
2. It is not offered with a manual transmission
If they offered a TD option with manual transmission on the Cruze Eco for $1500 extra they would have a hit on their hands... it would cost appreciably less than the Jetta TDI and offer better fuel economy. Instead they have gone the BMW E90 335d route and made it the highest spec and most expensive model in the range.   
It's almost like they don't want to sell them... |
While GM is worse than VW in this regard, VW does it too. You can't buy a base model Jetta or Passat with a TDi. The TDi is based off the SE which has more options and then has a few others thrown in there too.
I suspect that they do this because the actual additional cost of a diesel that meets our stringent EPA requirements isn't recouped by the price of the diesel option alone. So, it gets packaged with other "options" to get the margins to acceptable levels.