Considering a VW - How reliable are they?

[thomsbrain]

Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
VW's are reliable if you take care of them well.

If by "take care" you mean "fix all the shit that is constantly breaking," then sure, that's true for ANY car. By that measure, an old Jaguar is "reliable." It's plenty reliable, as long as your mechanic takes American Express.

But most of us take "reliable" to mean that shit doesn't break in the first place. As a former Volkswagen owner, I can say that Volkswagens are NOT reliable by that definition. We bought a very well-maintained low-mileage Jetta owned by a rich old lady family friend, with records. In six months of ownership, we spent roughly $1500 on maintenance before dumping it for a Mazda with double the miles that was far more reliable. We have a friend who just had the engine on her Jetta explode just outside of warranty. She had to roll the remainder of her loan into her next car -- a Civic, of course. I've literally rescued friends stranded on the side of road next to their mysteriously stalled Volkswagens dozens of times. These are cars that will fail to even turn over until you say magic incantations, then will fire right up. You really want to go there? If it was an old Ferrari or MG, we'd excuse it because the car is so special. But for a fucking Jetta?

 

[NaOH]

This is how I see it. LOTS of people don't take care of their crap. Some things are easier to break than others if you don't take care of it properly. This being VWs. Yeah, they probably have their fair share of lemons, maybe more than average. But just knowing how over 70% people are so goddamn ignorant about what they own, I'm not too suprised. Hell, I've known people who don't regularly check their oil and drive it into the ground once the oil level dipped below minimum on their VW. My friend's ex gf ran too low on oil in her bug and it forever squealed when she drove around.

Another example that's not really related to cars. LAPTOPS. EVERYONE I know uses them on insulating material like blankets, carpets, etc. Then their crap overheats, slows down, shuts off, dies and they blame the manufacturer..... My friend left his gf laptop on the ground while it was installing vista sp1 and it was there for 8 hours and NEVER finished. Then it crashed during the installation and they were going to give up. I put it on the damn coffee table and ran the install again and it worked fine.

 

[GroundedSailor]

Originally posted by: freegeeks

Originally posted by: GroundedSailor

Originally posted by: freegeeks
I don't understand the image that VW has in the USA. If you look at the yearly UK JD power satisfaction survey, the VW group in general scores above average and better then Nissan, Subaru and many others. If you look at the particular VW models, most owner praise their cars for being reliable.

And if you look at US JD Powers they come up last - just below Land Rover.

they must shipping all the pos then to the US

2007 survey linky

J.D. Power and Associates has released its 2008 Vehicle Dependability Study

Nameplate. . . . . . . Score

Lexus . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Mercury . . . . . . . . . . 151
Cadillac . . . . . . . . . . 155
Toyota. . . . . . . . . . . 159
Acura. . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Buick. . . . . . . . . . . . 163
BMW . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Lincoln . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Honda . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Jaguar . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Porsche . . . . . . . . . . 193
Mitsubishi . . . . . . . . . 197
Hyundai . . . . . . . . . . 200
Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Infiniti . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Industry Average 206
Audi . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Mercedes-Benz .. . . . 215
Nissan . . . . . . . . . . 224
Pontiac . . . . . . . . . . 225
GMC . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Mazda . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Subaru . . . . . . . . . . 228
Chrysler . . . . . . . . . 229
Dodge . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Mini . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Chevrolet . . . . . . . . 239
Hummer . . . . . . . . . 241
Scion . . . . . . . . . . 243
Volvo . . . . . . . . . . 244
Saturn . . . . . . . . . 250
Jeep. . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Volkswagen. . . . 253
Saab . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Isuzi . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Kia . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Suzuki . . . . . . . . . . 302
Land Rover . . . . . . 344

Source: J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Vehicle Dependability Study


Edit: OK so VW is not last. I could have swore I saw a list somewhere which had them last. Still near enough the bottom to be a POS! Maybe we got a bad piece.

 

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: NaOH
This is how I see it. LOTS of people don't take care of their crap. Some things are easier to break than others if you don't take care of it properly. This being VWs. Yeah, they probably have their fair share of lemons, maybe more than average. But just knowing how over 70% people are so goddamn ignorant about what they own, I'm not too suprised. Hell, I've known people who don't regularly check their oil and drive it into the ground once the oil level dipped below minimum on their VW. My friend's ex gf ran too low on oil in her bug and it forever squealed when she drove around.

Another example that's not really related to cars. LAPTOPS. EVERYONE I know uses them on insulating material like blankets, carpets, etc. Then their crap overheats, slows down, shuts off, dies and they blame the manufacturer..... My friend left his gf laptop on the ground while it was installing vista sp1 and it was there for 8 hours and NEVER finished. Then it crashed during the installation and they were going to give up. I put it on the damn coffee table and ran the install again and it worked fine.

VW had it's fair share of problems that even the most responsible owner could not have prevented. The plastic window clips that failed on thousands of MKIV Golf/Jetta variants wasn't the owners fault. Nothing they could have done would have prevented their windows from slamming down into the door. It was a poor design error on VW's part. They later switched them out with metal ones and the problems went away. But the bad taste was already in buyers mouths.

Same thing for the coilpacks. The 1.8T's were utterly plagued by this problem. It's probably the number one cause of "so and so's VW left them stranded". It was an issue with the OEM vendor (Bosch) and it left cars dead on the road, stalling out, and running like crap. Again, no preventative maintenance in the world would have helped this issue. This resulted in a massive recall once VW finally admitted it was a problem. This was also a huge player in the disastrous customer service scores that VW-USA has received. They treated customers like crap until they finally fessed up and honored warranty work on these things. Many people wound up paying $400 a pop for a failed coilpack only to come back in three more times for the same thing on the other three cylinders.

That being said, V6 Passats, as I mentioned, due have respectable reliability ratings. They are are built in Germany and have far less problems than the Mexico/South American built Golf/Jetta variants. The V6's are also free of the coilpack issues and a few other quibbles that the 1.8T had.

 

[krunchykrome]

They're not reliable

For the price, they're nice, but reliability is something they lack

 

[rdp6]

new multifunction display (basically the whole instrument cluster). New MFD was covered under warranty, took less than a week to get to NE Ohio and was installed in maybe 2 hours.

LOL, wtf kind of car has its full instrument panel fail?

The problem was graphical corruption in the MFD, all the gauges were fine. The corruption symptoms were consistent with any overheated computer and were limited to cases when I had the defroster on full for extended periods (>1 hour) while stuck in snowstorms on the highway in the snow belt of NE Ohio. When I brought it in it was working perfectly and had been without exception for a few weeks. I thought the service personnel wouldn't believe me, but they listened, checked it out (the car must keep a log) and told me that the replacement was the whole cluster and was on order when they were finished with the 20K service.

My worst inconvenience was really note being able to watch my trip computer show me in real time how much my overall fuel economy was dropping as I idled for what seemed like forever waiting for wrecks to be removed from I-76.

Before I chose the Passat I had a rented HHR which had a thoroughly broken climate control system. It only worked in whatever mode the switch was set to when the car was started. That really sucked given the hour+ commute in the winter.

edit: fixed inline quote

 

[NaOH]

Originally posted by: vi edit

Originally posted by: NaOH
This is how I see it. LOTS of people don't take care of their crap. Some things are easier to break than others if you don't take care of it properly. This being VWs. Yeah, they probably have their fair share of lemons, maybe more than average. But just knowing how over 70% people are so goddamn ignorant about what they own, I'm not too suprised. Hell, I've known people who don't regularly check their oil and drive it into the ground once the oil level dipped below minimum on their VW. My friend's ex gf ran too low on oil in her bug and it forever squealed when she drove around.

Another example that's not really related to cars. LAPTOPS. EVERYONE I know uses them on insulating material like blankets, carpets, etc. Then their crap overheats, slows down, shuts off, dies and they blame the manufacturer..... My friend left his gf laptop on the ground while it was installing vista sp1 and it was there for 8 hours and NEVER finished. Then it crashed during the installation and they were going to give up. I put it on the damn coffee table and ran the install again and it worked fine.

VW had it's fair share of problems that even the most responsible owner could not have prevented. The plastic window clips that failed on thousands of MKIV Golf/Jetta variants wasn't the owners fault. Nothing they could have done would have prevented their windows from slamming down into the door. It was a poor design error on VW's part. They later switched them out with metal ones and the problems went away. But the bad taste was already in buyers mouths.

Same thing for the coilpacks. The 1.8T's were utterly plagued by this problem. It's probably the number one cause of "so and so's VW left them stranded". It was an issue with the OEM vendor (Bosch) and it left cars dead on the road, stalling out, and running like crap. Again, no preventative maintenance in the world would have helped this issue. This resulted in a massive recall once VW finally admitted it was a problem. This was also a huge player in the disastrous customer service scores that VW-USA has received. They treated customers like crap until they finally fessed up and honored warranty work on these things. Many people wound up paying $400 a pop for a failed coilpack only to come back in three more times for the same thing on the other three cylinders.

That being said, V6 Passats, as I mentioned, due have respectable reliability ratings. They are are built in Germany and have far less problems than the Mexico/South American built Golf/Jetta variants. The V6's are also free of the coilpack issues and a few other quibbles that the 1.8T had.

Yeah, i think most of their cars are produced in germany now. So i think it shouldn't be as bad as before.