Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the small family car segment and utilize the same 4-door sedan body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific diesel engine choice they offer. The first one has a Volkswagen-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 90hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 70hp engine designed by FIAT.

Unfortunatelly, neither of the two vehicles was submitted to the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) testing. This makes it virtually impossible for me to pick one over the other and I'm generally against buying such cars as the safety should really always come first. Still, apart from the official crash test results there are other things we need to be aware of. Both vehicles belong to the small family car segment, which is generally classifying them somewhere in the middle safety-wise, still it doesn't help us solve our dilemma, does it?

I don't like generalizing things when it comes to reliability, although it does seem that FIAT does have a slight advantage, at least on all of the models level. These are the results of an independent reasearch, while our visitors describe reliability of Volkswagen with an average rating of 4.2, and models under the FIAT badge with 4.3 out of 5. The same official information place Jetta as average reliability-wise, and Albea is more or less at the same level.That apart, owners of different cars powered by the same engine as the German car rank it on average as 3.7, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 4.3 out of 5.

There's not enough data for me to elaborate on the subject, I'm affraid.

FIAT appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In this case though, it seems that both cars show similar levels of passenger protection all together, so that won't break a tie. When it comes to performance, both vehicles provide similar experience, so I wouldn't point any of them out. Fuel consumption is more or less the same. At the end, as much as I'd like to give you a winner here, it's simply a pure tie if you ask me. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. Also, you could use the oportunity to find out which car, everything taken into account, would be the perfect choice for you in the eyes of the virtual adviser™, among more than 12.000 different ones in our database.