Why Diesel Passat on in US for one year?

a thousand opinions on that are found at

I'll take"marketing reasons" such as: 'new model year, avoid saturating the market with unsold cars in year 1 if the finicky US market falls in love with something from japan/korea/brasil/yugoslavia; Consumer reports or the sierra club take a dislike to you, 18 more states adopt California emissions standards making the diesel unprofitable to sell, Insert business risk du jour here.'

Passats have long history of positive reviews since introduction, using a technology that is the mainstay of most cars the maker produces in its home country, but finding one will be the hard part, and negotiating price even harder.

I read in USA Today last week that the next Passat due for 2005 will not have a TDI option in the US, so yes it's probably true. Why I don't know...from what I understand the TDIs that VW is bringing here are flying off the lots. Could be an emissions thing...the US is supposed to get lower sulfur diesel sometime in the next few years but emissions standards I think are going even tighter anyway so maybe that's what's keeping them out...or at least not making them easy to bring in to be worth VWoA's time and money.

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, John A. Stovall at snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net wrote on 6/14/04 3:55 PM:

I read the same thing at USA Today online. The article did stipulate though that a redesign is coming out next year. Given that there was an annoucement that there would be three tdi options next year, I think that the one year refers to the current model. that said, only vw corporate knows what's true.