That sounds like too much work to me. Especially if it is a Winter oil change with 20 mph winds and 18 degrees F. laying on ice.
Yes I do that where required. No garage at my log cabin.
And I am old; my maternal Grandmother was born in 1886.
VW Factory oil, early oil change?
- Thread starter dgunay
- Start date
Yes I do that where required. No garage at my log cabin.
And I am old; my maternal Grandmother was born in 1886.
Zee09
$200 Site Donor 2023
Agreed.
I hate ramps and they really don't get the car up high enough.
Top extraction if you can...
Subaru, VW, and others make it easy on top extraction.
- Ours is a 1.4, but I cannot get a sample tube down the dipstick hole so i doubt you are going to top extract it.
- The under tray is a complete non-issue - if you can't get that off in under 3 minutes just turn your tools in
- I did not change early and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the oil around 9500 miles. It also did not seem special, though it was better than the Castrol.
Do you flip the car onto the passenger door for easy access?
As a retired professional, I don't do involved maintenance lying under the car as I was wont to do when I was a teenager, desperate to have my preferred mode of transportation always up and rolling.
If it aint way up on a two poster lift, or over a grease pit, it aint getting done.
I will suffer an easy oil change though. I recall my wife's early Subarus. You could sit cross legged in front of the bumper
and reach the oil filter and drain plug without lying on your back, as the engine was positioned so far forward
like the old Audi 80 and 90 longitudinal setups.
Dang, those engines were so far forward they had to put the radiator to one side!
Ironically enough VW used to have the first two oil changes at 5k and 10k then every 10k thereafter. Not sure when they moved away from this practice but I know it was a thing back with my '06 Jetta (MKV).
I early changed both my Passat and my Jetta. A UOA on the Passat at 19k already had metals at the completely normal broken in level, despite the low miles. I'm for getting early break in metals out of there.
Zee09
$200 Site Donor 2023
Mine was born in 1891
It wasn't the engineers that recommend the 10k OCI, it was the sales department.
There may be back and forth about the interval. Sales could have said 15k and they compromised at 10k.
I don't have any experience with VWs but are they well-known for oil-related engine failures ?
The longitudinal 1.8T had sludging issues back in the B5/B5.5 Passat days (1999-2004) - only in the longitudinal cars (Passat and A4) due to a smaller sump capacity vs the transverse cars. VW service department was pouring in dino 5W-30 (owners manual at the time required syn) and owners were following the 10k interval on a turbo car with a sump that was under 4 quarts IIRC, this was back when VW had free service for 2 years or 24k miles so the service departments were trying to save a buck. Don't recall it being a big thing with the Audi A4 as they probably had proper fluids used.
