So I am currently in a leased 2016 Honda Civic. The lease will come to an end in April, so I have started doing my research on if I want to go in to a new lease, or buy my civic out of the lease. I like my civic, it works just fine. Of course it will soon be time for maintenance expenses to start kick in. Things like new tires, and other big expenses that make leasing a car such an easy call, since the lease typically runs out before these maintenance items need to be taken care of.
So I went to look at the new 2019 Civic. It is almost identical to my existing car. There was a minor refresh this year, adding a knob to the radio and changing the front grill a little bit, but otherwise nothing new.
So really, I might as well buy my car out of the lease rather than lease a new Civic... But Civics are not the only vehicles out there....
I started looking around at a few different vehicles, and The above Volkswagon Jetta caught my eye. It has been redesigned for 2019 . One of the really cool features about the new Jetta is the Digital Cockpit.
This is a totally customizable space in front of the steering wheel where you can put whatever information you want, up to and including the navigation map. I found that a really really cool idea that I could get excited about.
So when I went in to check out the car, I sat in the SEL trim, which I thought had everything I was looking for. The very first thing I noticed was that the driver seat is not powered. No 6 way adjustable seating, this is four way adjustable, forward, back, up and down. That's disappointing.
The second thing I noticed was that the "panoramic" sunroof was not any bigger than the sunroof in my Civic. Not very panoramic really.
The next thing was that the engine cuts off when you come to a full stop, however, instead of mimicking Honda's Brake Assist which lets you have your foot off of both pedals while at a stop, this system immediately restarts the engine and begins drifting forward as soon as you take your foot off the brake. This isn't a huge deal, and the engine cut off is supposed to save $350 a year in gas costs. But I like my brake assist.
Finally, we started playing with the digital cockpit. Turns out, while the car is happy to hook in to your phone for Apple Car Play or Android Auto, the Digital Cockpit cannot display maps from those services, so the only way to get those maps up on the digital cockpit is to have the factory installed navigation.... which is not on this trim.
All in all, the Jetta is a nice car, I enjoyed the pick up that it had out on the highway, but all in all, it really didn't wow me enough to start talking numbers to see about trading my Civic.
So that's one car likely off the list. As nice as it is, I don't think they will give me the right price on the Premium Trim that includes everything the SEL is missing except for the brake assist. I've got two months to figure it all out, so we'll see if they do any sort of Lease incentives, but for now, it is on to the next....
