Changing a Jetta to meet European demands

Frankly your best bet is to sell what you have, but another there. The cost associated with bringing the car outweigh the cost of selling your current car and buying a new one.

The most important thing is to change the thing on the back that says JETTA to a thing that says BORA and they won't give you any trouble.

You will need european-code headlamps from a Bora. These will have parking lamps in them that are white. Your new headlamps will take care of the yellow vs. white parking light problem when they are connected up. Shouldn't be too hard.

The daytime running lights might have to be defeated (not sure though). That's an easy thing (just tape over the terminal on the headlamp switch marked 'TFL').

You will need a rear fog lamp so you will need to have that wired up. This will require a new headlamp switch that has rear fog control. Shouldn't be that hard to do.

The speedometer will probably need to be changed to km/h for the primary readout.

The front bumper side marker lamps are permitted (just not required) so you don't need to mess with those.

I believe that it's actually higher octane overseas so you engine should be happier.

Not sure what else there is to do, but those are the main ones that I know of.

Actually that reminds me too...the license plate opening on a US Jetta is for US-sized plates. You might end up with a special plate or at least some weird and unattrctive way of mounting a Euro plate unless you get a new trunk lid.

snipped-for-privacy@wpi.dk sloeg het volgende aan.

Must be no problem. alot of dutch marines bring there Us spec VW home from aruba. lightning, glass and seatbelts must have E marks. if that is a problem its eazy to swap.

small plates no problem in holland white MK3 golf

Hi Matt,

Thanks a lot for the help. It seems that there are some details I need to look into. Daytime running lights are required, so I won't change that.

It might be easier to sell it here, but it depends a little on how much I can get for it.

I would guess that the expense of new headlamps, switches aso could be $400-500.

License plates are a minor problems since most European countries has a small version that fits like Yoda showed in the Netherlands.

Thanks,

Carsten

Switch is probably just under $100. Headlamps aren't cheap but if you hunt around you might find some non-Hella reproduction units for a lot less (although quality might not necessarily be Hella-quality either).

That's good. I've seen pics of US cars overseas (with US-sized openings) and some with the standard Euro plates and implementation of that often looks pretty stupid they way they hack them on there, bend them, etc. :)