I'm willing to bet that no less than 95% of any response will be from someone that knows next to nothing about the car you want to buy, but is more than happy to jump on the euro car hate bandwagon so they can act like they know what they are talking about.
Possibly so. I've been trying to find vehicle reliability surveys on this particular model and have found nothing. For what it's worth, the guy seems to have squeezed 157k miles out of the vehicle so it can't have been THAT bad of a car (unless it's on its third engine or something).
The Bluebook on this car is $2200 so I have to wonder why he's low-balling his own vehicle (well, assuming it's in "excellent" condition, but "fair" is $1500). Might be the fuel economy numbers skewing his value expectations but I don't know.
I wouldn't call it a hate bandwagon. German cars don't break easily, but when they do it costs an arm and a leg. That's just the way things are. That and they don't have cup holders.
Well, that's the thing . . .it's $1400. If it breaks it can be abandoned, or sold for salvage, or something else entirely. If the thing runs right then even 30-40k miles out of it would probably be worth the money. If it dies the next day then it's wasted money.
Routine repairs might be undesirably expensive, so it would be a situation where I'd have to learn to DIY it as much as possible in order to avoid nasty labor charges. Might be more than I could handle, who knows.
Before I even think about making serious inquiries on the vehicle, I'll need data on the overall reliability of the car along with routine maintenance costs, especially considering the fact that the current owner may be less-than-forthcoming about all those things. If he has receipts, then that might be the best info for which I could ask.
I'll add that Audi, while having an admirably good racing effort, was otherwise a joke in the 80s. If I had to have any '80s german car, it would be a mercedes. Those things are simply tanks, and this is coming from a BMW fan.
What was the worst thing about them? And were the 200-series Audis from 89-91 jokes? If there was something genuinely awful about them, it would help me to know what that was. And yeah, I've looked at some Mercedes turbo diesels. There are some '81s for around $2500 semi-locally. Might be a good buy, might not.