Volkswagen Jetta axed from UK line-up

Khodrocar - Volkswagen has discontinued the Jetta, leaving the Passat as the sole surviving saloon in the brand’s UK line-up. 

The slow-selling Jetta shifted just 379 units between 1 January and 1 October in the UK, compared with 5398 Passat saloons and 52,722 Golf hatchbacks. A new version is coming next year and will be revealed at the Detroit motor show, although this is likely to be biased towards other markets, given stronger sales there. A VW UK spokesman wouldn't comment further upon this. 

A Volkswagen UK spokesman attributed the discontinuation to the car reaching the end of its life cycle. Furthermore, with a growing SUV segment, rising popularity of the Golf and the Polo increasing in size, customers have been looking elsewhere besides the increasingly unfashionable saloon segment. 

Although it has not been confirmed as going out of production by Volkswagen globally, the Jetta is also absent from the brand's German site, suggesting the model could be axed more widely.

As with the recently discontinued Scirocco, whose sales were 10 times more than the Jetta achieved in the same 10-month period, there are a number of Jettas still in the dealer network as Volkswagen clears the final units. This is unlikely to be more than a few hundred, however.

Orders closed for the Jetta in September. This leaves the Beetle as the slowest-selling Volkswagen model in the range, with 1344 units sold between January and October. Volkswagen executives have already suggested that the hard-top Beetle may not be long for this world.