I am starting to hunt for a replacement for my daily commuter. I am looking for a small car, diesel, and AWD and available in Canada.
I don’t think that there are yet any small cars with diesel engines available in the US, but things could be different in Canada since there are some models sold there that are not available in the US.
One possibility is Mercedes-Benz. They may market a diesel-powered “4-Matic” Mercedes in Canada, and a quick call to your MB dealership would give you an answer.
If you can wait about a year, there will be a much larger selection of diesel vehicles available on our side of the ocean, from Honda, Subaru, and other manufacturers. However, Subaru has already announced that the diesel-powered Legacy and Outback models sold in North America will be available only with a manual transmission, so if you want an automatic transmission, Subaru will not be the one for you.
I’m not sure there will be. The higher price of the new untra low sulpher diesel fuel has I think scapped many of the manufacturers’ plans to introduce diesels here. Subaru may have that market segment to itself.
I have seen a new style VW beetle diesel on the road. Are they still available? What about the Jetta TDI?
The blue-tech diesel VWs are available now, to the best of my knowledge, as is a Mercedes model. Honda is slated to follow for the next model year, along with Subaru, but I suspect that there will be others.
For instance, we may be treated to one or more diesel Fiat models as a result of their agreement with Chrysler. Toyota will likely lag in this segment of the marketplace, simply because they have put more effort into hybrid development than into blue-tech diesel development. Honda, on the other hand, has worked on both hybrid technology and blue-tech diesel technology.
Compact AWD diesels are very rare. The main reasons being that the AWD systems used in small cars cannot cope with the copeious amount of torque the diesels put out. They are simply too fragile. The only one I’m aware of is the euro-spec Impreza.
VW current has a 2009 Diesel Jetta, but I don’t believe they have it in a AWD in the US. I believe there are others this year as well. All European manufactures had to wait until this year to bring current technology engines in due to the quality of diesel we had. Now that the diesel supply has been cleaned up, I expect others to be coming in soon.