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VW Reliability

brian_riendeau

Platinum Member
I have seen this discussed a few times in the past but I am having troulbe finding the threads. I am looking for articles discussing VW reliability (or lack thereof).
 
My woman has a 2002 Jetta TDI and has not had any problem at all. Zip, zero zilch. Pretty nice car, in my opinion.

That JD Powers graphi is kind of nice. As all ATOTers know, Nissan and BMW are much much more reliable then GM.
Oh, wait. . .
 
92k miles on our '97 jetta. In the 7 years we have had it, it has been in the shop twice (for unscheduled stuff.) Of course, that doesn't count replacing the battery (twice?) and brakes and stuff.) Total cost of repairs was around $600.

That said, it probably won't start when I get out of work tonight, just to teach me that JD Power knows best.
 
The latest generation of VW has had more problems then they are worth. My wife had a Beetle and got rid of it after about 2 1/2 years. Car was constantly having problems which wasn't the biggest headache. The biggest headache was the dealers we had to deal with. VW sucks as a company and the way they treat their customers. I could write a ten page essay about the problems and crappy customer service I have gotten. There are about 5 people that I know that will never buy a VW again. That doesn't count the others that never had one and because of our experiences will never get one.

If VW would just admit the problems they have and fix the stupid cars without having the customers scream at them, then they might have a good car but until that day ever comes, good bye VW.
 
Originally posted by: optoman
The latest generation of VW has had more problems then they are worth. My wife had a Beetle and got rid of it after about 2 1/2 years. Car was constantly having problems which wasn't the biggest headache. The biggest headache was the dealers we had to deal with. VW sucks as a company and the way they treat their customers. I could write a ten page essay about the problems and crappy customer service I have gotten. There are about 5 people that I know that will never buy a VW again. That doesn't count the others that never had one and because of our experiences will never get one.

If VW would just admit the problems they have and fix the stupid cars without having the customers scream at them, then they might have a good car but until that day ever comes, good bye VW.

Sounds like my experience with Sony.
 
I have old VWs both with high miles. My 84 jetta gli has 360K miles on the body and 235k on the engine and tranny (16V from an 88 Scirocco).

My 87 Scirocco 8V has over 160K.

I dunno about the newer Dubs but the A1s that were made in Germany were built well.

There was a 99 Jetta GL TDi that was for sale in my area that I was thinking about, but thats too new for me. He wanted 9,000 abd it had only 35K miles.
 
Originally posted by: Marlin1975
Originally posted by: maziwanka
Originally posted by: Marlin1975
Graph1

Graph2

You can see the over priced VW is right around daewoo/kia/etc... area :laugh:

wow. GM is freaking awesome!



Careful, this is anandtech, everybody "knows" GM sucks 😉

Everyone knows that Japanese cars are better than American unless it's Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Nissan...

And one thing to note: There is a lot of crap imports that never make it to our shores. We get the best stuff.
 
Originally posted by: woowoo
I don't own a vw but I do remember something about coil packs?

The coil packs on the newer VWs were recalled and my wifes car was one of them. Dealer would only replace them as they failed and would not do all four. They replaced one, my wife said there was a recall but they still wouldn't do all of them. A few days later her car died on her and she had to have it towed in. Wasted her whole day for something that would of taken the dealer about another 20 minutes to do.

The coil packs on my 98 jetta were never recalled and they all had the infamous cracking issue. I went thru two of them before I found out that a little silicon does the trick. Thank god I purchased the extened warranty that covered the $450 bills everytime. Now my window regulators are all starting to fail. There is a class action law suit for the regulators on all A3 models trying to force VW to replace them. VW is replacing them on all the newer models but not after the gov't highway agency told them to and numerous complaints to the BBB. It was something like a 25% of the cars were having the problem at last count. Oh, and VW won't replace the newer regulators until they brake and the window falls down into the door making it impossible to close. Happened to my brother in law while he was driving home to Boston in the rain on the Mass pike about 150 miles from Boston.
 
Well, I own an '02 A4 and have positive and negative. On the up side, it is one fine automobile and the most enjoyable car I test drove, with the BMW 3 series a very close 2nd.

However, I have had a few problems. For one, the radio crashes once in a while, requiring a fuse removeal and reinsertion. That's rare, though. It had a collapsed hose, which was much more scary (stalling while turning left). And the fuel gauge probe got stuck somewhere and I ran out of gas with the indicator still saying 1/3 full.

My coils were recalled too (same engine as VW). There was quite a lot of confusion about the recall, though. I think the problem was due to media falsely reporting it as a recall instead of a "future recall". They simply couldn't produce the coils fast enough to recall all vehicles (that would be most jettas, passats, and a4s basically). Instead their initial release said to come in if you have problems, and THEN there would be a recall. Eventually it WAS recalled and I got mine replaced.

A positive is that the dealer here is first rate. Though there are other branches of the same name which are crappy and treat you like dirt, the audi dealer is top notch. I have been extremely satisfied with the overall experience of dealing with an audi dealer. I can say the same about infiniti. VW, on the other hand, was abysmal. I wasn't expecting a sitcom-esque charicature to sell me a VW, much less numerous ones.

On the other hand, no matter how bad the VW dealer was, the lexus dealer was absolutely the worst dealer I have ever dealt with. I went in to test drive a couple models. They didn't even say a word to me for 20 minutes. When they did, they claimed that they don't do test drives ("people who come in here already know what they want") but they were "generous" enough to let me look inside of a car right before they rushed me out of the door.
 
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