If there's one thing I never appreciate, it's when a vendor outright lies about their product—or at least, comes close enough to doing so that it's intentionally misleading. Allow me to present Exhibit A, an e-mail that VW is sending around about its long-anticipated Jetta TDI clean diesel vehicle. One of these babies (pictured) is at a local dealer in Bedford, MA—I've already seen the car. But then a reader forwarded this e-mail along. (Contents after the jump.)

"Your local Volkswagen dealer just received one of the very first Jetta TDI Clean Diesel Sedans available in the U.S. And as a Volkswagen insider, we thought you might like a little advance notice. This is your chance to be among the first to stop by and take it for a spin. With a quieter diesel 140 hp, 236 lbs-ft of torque, and 4-cylinder turbocharged direct injection engine—plus an AMCI rated 38 city/44 hwy mpg—we think you'll realize TDI clean diesel is definitely the way to go."

As I wrote last month, the AMCI thing is something that they alone came up with—some kind of independent testing that they paid for. The EPA rating, which they list in very tiny print at the bottom of the e-mail, is actually 29/40, which turned out to be a huge disappointment compared to the 60 mpg they had been trumpeting some months ago.

Granted, there's some debate over diesel cars and EPA ratings these days. Most cars don't meet the EPA ratings, even after the 2008 adjustments, but a lot of diesel owners experience the exact opposite phenomenon, where their cars easily exceed the EPA ratings. So maybe this is warranted. But the way VW is handling it is certainly not honest, as the EPA numbers are the only objective ones we have right now. As a former enthusiastic VW Jetta VR6 owner, this is especially galling.