The last month has been trying with this vehicle.. I hated Audis earlier in life, to which most people for some reason thought I was jealous. I wasn’t. There was a reason.
And this is the month that I’m reminded of it.
Quick background: I bought the car about 10 months ago and have had no problems with it aside from a miniscule coolant leak and some squealing from the turbo. Those things I was willing to put up with until it was warmer out. I ordered an S3 turbo which is a K04, I believe slightly smaller than the one on my 2007 Solstice GXP — but much bigger than the stock K03 and the same price as the puny stock one. And who could argue with more power, right? And I really don’t mind working on my own cars so long as I’m not fixing them. If I’m UPGRADING them, that’s a different story, right? So it got warm out.
So it all started when I went to put UV dye in my coolant system to track down this little leak that left no puddles or obvious signs, it was extremely slow. I hop in the car and go to drive it to get it good and hot and try to see if I can get my UV light and find some signs of the leak. Can you guess what happened within the next 15 minutes?
The car overheated. Quickly. I put the heat on, and that wasn’t working which told me I had just lost a massive amount of water. I was very close to home and decided to risk the 1/4 mile trip with as little throttle as possible. Audi likes to do this cool thing where they make everything out of plastic. Like coolant flanges on that bolt on to the back of the engine in a nigh-unreachable spot and connect the motor’s coolant passages to the heater hose and upper radiator hose and god knows what else.
Plastic is awesome.
This little piece of plastic took hours. And they break. All the time. Awesome design, Audi! It’s a cheap part, I think I paid around $20. Then I paid $100 for a new heater hose that connects to it just for peace of mind, and about $15 on another hose that’s about 4″ long (it’s probably one of the more expensive 4″ pieces of black hose you’ll run into).
So I somehow get the coolant flange in there and manage to get the hoses on it, I bolt the cam-driven vacuum pump back on and the high pressure fuel pump — I buy another emissions related hose and that sets me back $75 as the clips on mine broke. The PCV valve which is plastic, of course (and no it’s not a Positive Crankcase pressure Valve, it’s Audi’s ridiculous idea of Crankcase regulation) has nice hot oil fumes coming up into it — which make the plastic very brittle. I’ve already replaced it, but it seems to break with minimal pressure. Guess it’s getting changed again. I find out my valve cover is made of plastic and there’s a screw with the head broken off in it that holds the PCV valve..
I remember why I hate Audi.
I start the car, take it for a drive, everything seems to be OK until I get about 10 miles out.. the car slowly starts overheating. I try to bleed the outrageous coolant system. It doesn’t help. I notice there’s no water flow unless you rev the engine.. with a bled system a sure sign of a bad water pump. Which means you get to take the entire nose of the car off so you can change the TIMING BELT DRIVEN WATER PUMP!
Yay.
Did I mention the OE water pump impeller is made of plastic and all the replacements are cast iron? Gee, I wonder why.
Thanks Audi. Clearly I was just jealous all these years. The cuts all over my hands are a testament to that. I’m so glad I finally own some kind of Audi.
In all seriousness though, it seemed to be very reasonably priced for a comfortable “AWD” (It’s not really AWD, don’t let that Quattro stuff fool you — the rear diff is open!) vehicle, and I couldn’t drive my daughter around in snowy weather in a rear wheel drive car with large tires — because they just act like big sleds and you don’t get to go anywhere.
This story continues with a horrible tale of a timing belt replacement.
And I ask myself — why did my 1979 Firebird need less maintenance and why was it literally over one hundred times faster to fix mechanical issues on it?
