I’ve always liked the Jetta for being an sensible, well-executed, car-flavoured car. Like a pint of a crisp lager or a scoop of vanilla ice cream, it’s never not going to be popular. The staples have become staples, and despite nearly everything coming and going in trends and tastes, remain staples for a reason. The only trouble with staples is that they’re really tricky to iterate on, so let’s take a look at the 2025 Volkswagen Jetta Highline to see what they’ve done with the recipe.
The Jetta is refreshed for 2025. As is the case when Coors or Chapman’s is under pressure from their respective marketing departments to update their core products just so they have something new to sell, Volkswagen has pretty much just changed the packaging and called it a day. I, for one, applaud this commitment to staying the course.
The updated Jetta gets revised front and rear fascias with updated lighting, some new wheel designs, a few new colours like the lovely Monterey Blue on our tester, and an updated dashboard design. It’s a modest update, but it does the job in making it look more contemporary than the outgoing car. I also appreciate that they’ve gone for less grille and smaller headlights, pursuing cleanliness over more-for-the-sake-of-more. A little bit goes a long way here.
Inside, Volkswagen has bowed to modern conventions. There’s a lot of gloss black trim now, and a lot of the buttons and knobs from the outgoing Jetta have been axed in favour of capacitive touch controls. The centre screen has grown slightly, and is slightly sharper and significantly snappier in its response than before. It’s no longer incorporated into the dashboard, but now sticks out slightly. This allows the dashboard to appear slimmer, and the horizontal lines spanning across make it look wider than it is, creating a greater sense of space.
I don’t love that they’ve gotten away from physical controls, but I applaud that they’ve done it in a way that still works well enough. No functions have been removed from the centre stack, so there’s no day-to-day essentials that are buried under screen menus. Everything is large, easy to see, easy to hit, and not at all a chore to live with. There’s still volume and tuning knobs around the screen, as well as shortcut buttons to simplify things.
This is not the same contentious interface as the GTI; it looks more modern, which pleases the consumer. It’s easy enough for brain-dead critics—like myself—to figure out. And I’m guessing it helps keep costs down, which pleases the bean-counters. Win-win-win.
Other than that, the 2025 Jetta is pretty much the same car as before. This is a good thing. The 1.5-litre turbo-four remains unchanged, putting out a perfectly adequate 158 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque. It feels more than peppy enough and never feels like it’s working too hard, with peak torque coming on at just 1,750 rpm. It’s a refined, quiet powerplant aided by an eight-speed automatic that is in the same vein as the engine—perfectly adequate.
It’s also impressively frugal. I averaged 6.5 L/100 kilometres with it—on cheap gas, too—and that’s with making extensive use of the remote start to pre-heat the seats and steering wheel. Said seats are also powered with adjustable lumbar support, and even ventilated. The rear seats are heated as well, along with being exceptionally spacious for this class. There’s excellent headroom and legroom; I could comfortably sit behind myself at six-feet tall. And the Jetta still has the same monster trunk as before.
Just as before, the Jetta has excellent road manners. It’s quiet, and has a well-calibrated chassis that neatly balances good ride comfort and taut body control. The steering is light on-centre and at low speeds, but weights up nicely in corners. It drives like a Jetta should, and that’s also a good thing. The same driver assists, like a very well -alibrated adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist, also return to keep living with the Jetta easier than ever.
This platform has been around forever. The powertrain is proven and hits all the right targets. The tooling has been paid off for years. Why turn your back on a good thing? Nothing about the outgoing car didn’t work; this refreshed carefully just makes a few choice tweaks to look a little more contemporary without upsetting the apple cart. The Jetta has always been a winner for offering a robust feature set, a great driving experience, and remarkable efficiency in a car that feels nicer than its price would convey. And with our loaded 2025 Volkswagen Jetta Highline tester ringing in at $32,195 as-tested, they haven’t taken their eyes off the value prize, either.
