That legendary German quality
02-06-2005, 12:46 PM
#1
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That legendary German quality
After we got our fourth recall notice on our 99 volksagen Passat wagon, I told my wife to just wait for the next one and kill two birds with one stone. #5 showed up today. Get this - the letter is dated June 2003.
More recalls on this car than on all 7 honda/acura products we have owned. And thousands in repairs unrelated to waraanty items.
More recalls on this car than on all 7 honda/acura products we have owned. And thousands in repairs unrelated to waraanty items.
02-06-2005, 01:13 PM
#2
Registered Member
Yeah, I can sympathize with you. My wife's car is a 1996 BMW 328i and everytime it goes into the shop, we know we are going to be hit with a large bill. Year before last it was over $4,000 and last year, over $1,000. We not take it to a small auto shop in out town, within walking distance. The owner is the chief mechanic and is fantastic.
The so-called German quality and mechanical sophistication helped them lose the war (thank God).
The so-called German quality and mechanical sophistication helped them lose the war (thank God).
02-06-2005, 01:13 PM
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Next time you buy a car, take a good long hard look at the Consumer Reports frequency of repair records.
VW's, Benz's, Beamers, Audis get a big
on most recent models.
And the most expensive new Beamer, the 745i, is NOT RECOMMENDED.
That unfortunately goes for Swedish cars too.
They're nowhere near as trouble free as they used to be either.
VW's, Benz's, Beamers, Audis get a big
on most recent models.And the most expensive new Beamer, the 745i, is NOT RECOMMENDED.
That unfortunately goes for Swedish cars too.
They're nowhere near as trouble free as they used to be either.
02-06-2005, 01:51 PM
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I agree on 999999’s comment about the bad VW quality. My friend used to own a Jetta and it wasn’t that reliable. But I have to say that the VW is the worst German car brand you can buy. I believe some models are made in Mexico, so you cannot use VW to judge German qualities. However, if you look at better brands such as MB, BMW, and Audi, they make much better cars than VW in general. It is also correct that they make SOME unreliable cars. Problems may include bad windshield motor, transmission, etc. I know this sounds crazy, but I rather to have ONE of those problems then to have so many dumb ass problems with my TL. The reason behind my rationale is because I don’t think rattles in many cases CANNOT be fixed.
02-06-2005, 02:40 PM
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Originally Posted by Yoda117
what I find amusing is that the Volvo gets poor ratings with some of their models in reliability and satisfaction and yet manages a recommended label?
There are some threads about absolutely nightmarish experiences going on right now at the Volvo "R" board, one about an S60R that's being compared to the Stephen King novel character, the haunted red 1958 Plymouth, Christine.
As to the "why" (the reliability problem extends to all of the European marques), this was a question addressed in a Wall Street Journal article a few months back. I thought the following quote was revealing enough that I copied and saved it:
"The BMW 7 Series, for example, has more than 120 electric motors, including 38 just for the front seats."
Trending Topics
02-06-2005, 02:49 PM
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Interesting article in today's NY Times:
February 6, 2005
What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?
By TIM MORAN
DETROIT
ON a hot summer trip to Cape Cod, the Mills family minivan did a peculiar thing. After an hour on the road, it began to bake the children. Mom and Dad were cool and comfortable up front, but heat was blasting into the rear of the van and it could not be turned off.
Fortunately for the Mills children, their father - W. Nathaniel Mills III, an expert on computer networking at I.B.M. - is persistent. When three dealership visits, days of waiting and the cumbersome replacement of mechanical parts failed to fix the problem, he took the van out and drove it until the oven fired up again. Then he rushed to the mechanic to look for a software error.
"It took two minutes for them to hook up their diagnostic tool and find the fault," said Mr. Mills, senior technical staff member at I.B.M.'s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. "I can almost see the software code; a sensor was bad."
Indeed, the high-tech comfort system was confused. The rear temperature sensor of the 2001 Dodge van had gone bad and was sending a signal that the children were freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The loyal van was doggedly trying to warm them up.
The minivan's problem was unusual only in the specific form it took. Owners across the country and around the globe have posted anguished cries to Internet forums about electronic gremlins that stop windows from rolling all the way up, that unexpectedly dim the interior lights, that drain batteries or that make engines sputter. While most automakers have had problems, quality rankings for some - particularly technology-intensive German luxury brands renowned for engineering - have plunged.
Not only are the glitches annoying, their root causes can be hard to find. Problems are often fleeting and may not be recorded by on-board diagnostics systems.
"It's these transient things that tend to drive people nuts," Mr. Mills said.
David E. Cole, president of the Center for Automotive Research, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., says electronics may be the cause of a third of warranty claims.
"The complexity is increasing," he said. "There's just a lot more electronics."
There is more software, too, and it comes from many sources, noted Thilo Koslowski, lead automotive analyst in San Jose, Calif., for a research firm, Gartner G2.
"It's one of the biggest quality issues the automotive industry is dealing with," Mr. Koslowski said. "The problem is that most of these applications in the vehicle are being supplied by a lot of different suppliers."
Mr. Koslowski said the auto industry was not yet very good at integrating software, so buyers inherit systems that can interfere with one another - just as installing incompatible programs can make a personal computer malfunction. He said a niche might soon emerge for companies that integrate various software systems before they go into a vehicle, in the way that companies like Dell sell PC's with the operating system and programs already working in harmony.
Meg Self says I.B.M. is planning to provide that kind of service. She is the company's director of Embedded Systems Lifecycle Management, its name for a new business venture dealing with automotive software and electronics. Ms. Self said that 32 percent of warranty costs could be attributed to dealership service visits at which no problem was found.
I.B.M. predicts that by 2010, almost all cars will have essentially the same mechanical systems. What will make the cars different will be software that operates the systems in ways specific to the brand of car. With so much of a vehicle's identity riding on computer code, carmakers must get the software right.
That would be fine with one frustrated consumer, Stephanie Pavisic of Elmhurst, Ill., who works for a company that specializes in "information integrity" software that double-checks bank transactions for absolute accuracy. Since she bought a fully equipped Mercedes-Benz C230 in 2001, she has suffered through a string of hard-to-diagnose electronics problems.
She recounts episodes of her car shaking uncontrollably and sounding as if it's stalling. In October, on a freeway, it simply shut down. "I take it down the street and it just shakes," Ms. Pavisic said. "People are looking at me, wondering what I'm doing."
Ms. Pavisic has kept a log of the problems, which sent her to the dealership 14 times in three years. Despite all that scrutiny, technicians haven't found a digital explanation. "Probably I'm just not used to driving the car," she says she was told.
She has made friends online with five or six other C230 owners, including one in South Africa, who are trying to diagnose shared problems. While she has considered legal action, she says what she really wants is simply for her car to work.
"Everything is a sensor," she said, reading a list of attempted fixes: "They replaced the fuel-level sensor three times. Replaced the main fuel filter two times. Replaced crankshaft position sensor two times."
Among the electronic flaws on her car, the software-based service system that sends out maintenance reminders went haywire, telling her at 8,000 miles that the car needed its 10,000-mile service. At 17,000 miles, it requested the 20,000-mile service. There have been no more reminders, though the mileage is now 39,000.
As more electronics and software make their way into all sorts of vehicles, hard-to-diagnose problems have cropped up repeatedly. Late last year, Ford warned its dealers that software might disable the continuously variable transmissions in some 30,000 of its new Ford Five Hundred sedans and Freestyle sport wagons. The mechanical parts are fine, but a computer control meant to detect dirty transmission fluid was putting some cars into sluggish "limp home" mode. Ford had to rewrite software to fix the problem, which it says was caught before any vehicles reached customers.
But luxury cars packed with electronic features suffer more because they adopt new technology earlier, said Chance Parker, executive director for auto quality surveys at J. D. Power & Associates. And the gremlins may be especially galling to luxury buyers who expect their cars' pricey "surprise and delight" features to delight them, not to surprise them in unpleasant ways.
Some complaints turn out to be not failures, but features that are difficult to use, said Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the auto information site. Systems that combine many tasks into a single controller, like BMW's iDrive, draw lots of complaints in Edmunds's online forums. "It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it," Mr. Moody said.
BMW says it takes an ordinary driver about a month to become comfortable with iDrive. To help new owners, the company suggests that they bring their cars back to the dealer after two weeks for an intensive training session.
Mercedes-Benz had to replace many of its early Comand integrated control systems because of failures, and has since worked to simplify the controls. Stephan Wolfsried, vice president for electronic systems in Germany, told Automotive News last year that the company had eliminated 600 electronic functions in its cars, starting with the 2003 models, to improve quality and make the remaining functions easier to use. Mr. Wolfsried was quoted as saying these were features that "no one really needed and no one knew how to use."
A spokesman for Mercedes-Benz USA, Robert Moran, said it was important to distinguish technological leadership in safety features from high-tech convenience features. "We are not in a race to out-tech the competition, but do embrace new technologies" that result in better cars, said Mr. Moran, who is not related to this writer.
He said Mercedes had gained 10 points in the latest J. D. Power Customer Service Index, which measures satisfaction with warranty repairs and service, and also showed improvement in Power's Initial Quality Survey, which measures complaints about brand-new cars.
Complex systems that are hard to learn can frustrate early users, but are ultimately accepted. Other systems, though, tend to crash, just like computers. When that happens, drivers can be maddened by failures that force them to stop the car, then restart it; that illuminate the "check engine" light; or that send the car into limp-home mode.
One common problem comes not from software, but from pollution controls. On cars with second-generation diagnostics, a sensor often interprets a loose gas cap as a failure of the evaporative emissions system, tripping the "check engine" light.
Often, problems that seem like electronic failures are owner oversights, said John M. Robison, a BMW and Mercedes enthusiast who often posts to electronic forums.
"People don't read the owners' manual," said Mr. Robison of Vancouver, Wash., a retired manager of large scale computer systems for United Airlines and Bank of America. "When you've got all this complexity, the first thing you have to do is spend half a day with the book."
On the other hand, when he bought his most recent car, a 2002 Mercedes-Benz C240, he made sure to get one without a lot of extra features. It has fewer things to go wrong, he said.
Electronics problems are the bane of luxury cars, he said, and owners often don't know if they have the latest version of the software that runs crucial systems.
He mentioned the drivetrain software in his own Mercedes. "I know there are four different versions of the software," he said. "I don't know which one I've got. If I went to the dealer, I'd ask him to update it, because I'm sure I'm two or three generations away from being current."
February 6, 2005
What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?
By TIM MORAN
DETROIT
ON a hot summer trip to Cape Cod, the Mills family minivan did a peculiar thing. After an hour on the road, it began to bake the children. Mom and Dad were cool and comfortable up front, but heat was blasting into the rear of the van and it could not be turned off.
Fortunately for the Mills children, their father - W. Nathaniel Mills III, an expert on computer networking at I.B.M. - is persistent. When three dealership visits, days of waiting and the cumbersome replacement of mechanical parts failed to fix the problem, he took the van out and drove it until the oven fired up again. Then he rushed to the mechanic to look for a software error.
"It took two minutes for them to hook up their diagnostic tool and find the fault," said Mr. Mills, senior technical staff member at I.B.M.'s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. "I can almost see the software code; a sensor was bad."
Indeed, the high-tech comfort system was confused. The rear temperature sensor of the 2001 Dodge van had gone bad and was sending a signal that the children were freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The loyal van was doggedly trying to warm them up.
The minivan's problem was unusual only in the specific form it took. Owners across the country and around the globe have posted anguished cries to Internet forums about electronic gremlins that stop windows from rolling all the way up, that unexpectedly dim the interior lights, that drain batteries or that make engines sputter. While most automakers have had problems, quality rankings for some - particularly technology-intensive German luxury brands renowned for engineering - have plunged.
Not only are the glitches annoying, their root causes can be hard to find. Problems are often fleeting and may not be recorded by on-board diagnostics systems.
"It's these transient things that tend to drive people nuts," Mr. Mills said.
David E. Cole, president of the Center for Automotive Research, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., says electronics may be the cause of a third of warranty claims.
"The complexity is increasing," he said. "There's just a lot more electronics."
There is more software, too, and it comes from many sources, noted Thilo Koslowski, lead automotive analyst in San Jose, Calif., for a research firm, Gartner G2.
"It's one of the biggest quality issues the automotive industry is dealing with," Mr. Koslowski said. "The problem is that most of these applications in the vehicle are being supplied by a lot of different suppliers."
Mr. Koslowski said the auto industry was not yet very good at integrating software, so buyers inherit systems that can interfere with one another - just as installing incompatible programs can make a personal computer malfunction. He said a niche might soon emerge for companies that integrate various software systems before they go into a vehicle, in the way that companies like Dell sell PC's with the operating system and programs already working in harmony.
Meg Self says I.B.M. is planning to provide that kind of service. She is the company's director of Embedded Systems Lifecycle Management, its name for a new business venture dealing with automotive software and electronics. Ms. Self said that 32 percent of warranty costs could be attributed to dealership service visits at which no problem was found.
I.B.M. predicts that by 2010, almost all cars will have essentially the same mechanical systems. What will make the cars different will be software that operates the systems in ways specific to the brand of car. With so much of a vehicle's identity riding on computer code, carmakers must get the software right.
That would be fine with one frustrated consumer, Stephanie Pavisic of Elmhurst, Ill., who works for a company that specializes in "information integrity" software that double-checks bank transactions for absolute accuracy. Since she bought a fully equipped Mercedes-Benz C230 in 2001, she has suffered through a string of hard-to-diagnose electronics problems.
She recounts episodes of her car shaking uncontrollably and sounding as if it's stalling. In October, on a freeway, it simply shut down. "I take it down the street and it just shakes," Ms. Pavisic said. "People are looking at me, wondering what I'm doing."
Ms. Pavisic has kept a log of the problems, which sent her to the dealership 14 times in three years. Despite all that scrutiny, technicians haven't found a digital explanation. "Probably I'm just not used to driving the car," she says she was told.
She has made friends online with five or six other C230 owners, including one in South Africa, who are trying to diagnose shared problems. While she has considered legal action, she says what she really wants is simply for her car to work.
"Everything is a sensor," she said, reading a list of attempted fixes: "They replaced the fuel-level sensor three times. Replaced the main fuel filter two times. Replaced crankshaft position sensor two times."
Among the electronic flaws on her car, the software-based service system that sends out maintenance reminders went haywire, telling her at 8,000 miles that the car needed its 10,000-mile service. At 17,000 miles, it requested the 20,000-mile service. There have been no more reminders, though the mileage is now 39,000.
As more electronics and software make their way into all sorts of vehicles, hard-to-diagnose problems have cropped up repeatedly. Late last year, Ford warned its dealers that software might disable the continuously variable transmissions in some 30,000 of its new Ford Five Hundred sedans and Freestyle sport wagons. The mechanical parts are fine, but a computer control meant to detect dirty transmission fluid was putting some cars into sluggish "limp home" mode. Ford had to rewrite software to fix the problem, which it says was caught before any vehicles reached customers.
But luxury cars packed with electronic features suffer more because they adopt new technology earlier, said Chance Parker, executive director for auto quality surveys at J. D. Power & Associates. And the gremlins may be especially galling to luxury buyers who expect their cars' pricey "surprise and delight" features to delight them, not to surprise them in unpleasant ways.
Some complaints turn out to be not failures, but features that are difficult to use, said Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the auto information site. Systems that combine many tasks into a single controller, like BMW's iDrive, draw lots of complaints in Edmunds's online forums. "It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it," Mr. Moody said.
BMW says it takes an ordinary driver about a month to become comfortable with iDrive. To help new owners, the company suggests that they bring their cars back to the dealer after two weeks for an intensive training session.
Mercedes-Benz had to replace many of its early Comand integrated control systems because of failures, and has since worked to simplify the controls. Stephan Wolfsried, vice president for electronic systems in Germany, told Automotive News last year that the company had eliminated 600 electronic functions in its cars, starting with the 2003 models, to improve quality and make the remaining functions easier to use. Mr. Wolfsried was quoted as saying these were features that "no one really needed and no one knew how to use."
A spokesman for Mercedes-Benz USA, Robert Moran, said it was important to distinguish technological leadership in safety features from high-tech convenience features. "We are not in a race to out-tech the competition, but do embrace new technologies" that result in better cars, said Mr. Moran, who is not related to this writer.
He said Mercedes had gained 10 points in the latest J. D. Power Customer Service Index, which measures satisfaction with warranty repairs and service, and also showed improvement in Power's Initial Quality Survey, which measures complaints about brand-new cars.
Complex systems that are hard to learn can frustrate early users, but are ultimately accepted. Other systems, though, tend to crash, just like computers. When that happens, drivers can be maddened by failures that force them to stop the car, then restart it; that illuminate the "check engine" light; or that send the car into limp-home mode.
One common problem comes not from software, but from pollution controls. On cars with second-generation diagnostics, a sensor often interprets a loose gas cap as a failure of the evaporative emissions system, tripping the "check engine" light.
Often, problems that seem like electronic failures are owner oversights, said John M. Robison, a BMW and Mercedes enthusiast who often posts to electronic forums.
"People don't read the owners' manual," said Mr. Robison of Vancouver, Wash., a retired manager of large scale computer systems for United Airlines and Bank of America. "When you've got all this complexity, the first thing you have to do is spend half a day with the book."
On the other hand, when he bought his most recent car, a 2002 Mercedes-Benz C240, he made sure to get one without a lot of extra features. It has fewer things to go wrong, he said.
Electronics problems are the bane of luxury cars, he said, and owners often don't know if they have the latest version of the software that runs crucial systems.
He mentioned the drivetrain software in his own Mercedes. "I know there are four different versions of the software," he said. "I don't know which one I've got. If I went to the dealer, I'd ask him to update it, because I'm sure I'm two or three generations away from being current."
02-06-2005, 04:17 PM
#11
Instructor
Thread Starter
Our VW was built in Germany. I would not have considered the Mexican variety.
We have both big and small problems - the best of both worlds.
All of the German brands rate below Honda/Acura for reliability. Saying BMW beats VW is faiint praise, indeed.
We have both big and small problems - the best of both worlds.
All of the German brands rate below Honda/Acura for reliability. Saying BMW beats VW is faiint praise, indeed.
02-06-2005, 05:49 PM
#12
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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2
In most cases, the problem is an EE wrote the code instead of a Software Engineer (or a crappy Software Engineer did it).
02-06-2005, 07:48 PM
#13
One on the right for me
I was talking to the valet a month ago and he was telling me about his piece of shit toureg or whatever the hell they are called. he said he had to take it back to the dealer more times than he could count in a week and wished he had got the TL.
02-06-2005, 08:05 PM
#14
Racer
Simplicity does not always equal reliability. Remember Yugo? Dirt simple and the worst reliabilty of any brand. Complexity also does not equal lack of reliability. Contrast the Lexus LS430 against the BMW 7 series, both about the same in complexity. The Lexus is basically at the TOP of the reliability charts, and it has all the electronics and gadgets. It's who makes the product, who their suppliers are, the standards enforced on the suppliers, the intelligence used in cost cutting measures, and many other factors.
02-06-2005, 09:25 PM
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Originally Posted by subinf
I was talking to the valet a month ago and he was telling me about his piece of shit toureg or whatever the hell they are called. he said he had to take it back to the dealer more times than he could count in a week and wished he had got the TL.
02-06-2005, 09:52 PM
#16
One on the right for me
He told me he paid 55k for his...I guess he does alright, at least by Marin standards.
another thing i recently heard about german cars, more specifically Mercedes, is that in order to compete with luxury cars made by acura and lexus and infiniti, they are knocking them out of the plants with cheap parts and a lower price tag. You dont get the feel when you get into an entry level mercedes or bmw as you would one of their higher end models...although i am sure you enounter the same service problems.
another thing i recently heard about german cars, more specifically Mercedes, is that in order to compete with luxury cars made by acura and lexus and infiniti, they are knocking them out of the plants with cheap parts and a lower price tag. You dont get the feel when you get into an entry level mercedes or bmw as you would one of their higher end models...although i am sure you enounter the same service problems.
02-06-2005, 09:58 PM
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In most cases, the problem is an EE wrote the code instead of a Software Engineer (or a crappy Software Engineer did it).
02-06-2005, 11:04 PM
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Originally Posted by bayTL
Well, EE's (I am one) just want the damm thing to work and not get overly geeky on the solution like some software engineers will do....Nothings worse than some pepsi addicted software geek who never actually has or will use the product he is trying to program....
02-07-2005, 12:15 AM
#19
05/5AT/Navi/ABP/Quartz
I think most average dummies like me don't give a rats ass who does the design or programming. We just want stuff that works all the time and that someone at the dealer can fix when it dosen't.
02-07-2005, 08:14 AM
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Really don't want to know how sausage is made... I understand. Bit heads and engineers/ techie types do like to know how and why and why not..especially when something doesn't work right. It makes us feel like we have some control over the situation. Even if that is an illusion.
02-07-2005, 10:17 AM
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Sorry about your luck. I guess you should have done your research before buying a VW. Over the years VW has been mid pack or near the bottom in reliability. German's are known for building fantastic driving/handling autos but reliability is NOT very high on the priority list.
02-07-2005, 12:12 PM
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The ugly truth is that german cars have never been reliable (except bimmers). German reliability is not a legend it has always been a myth. In fact till the 70's when toyota and honda came along all cars were unreliable if looked at by todays standards, thats why there were so many weekend grease monkies. Carburation, mechanical distributors,brakes and so on were always in need of "tuning". Mercedes, porsche and VW were reliability liabilities especially as now as far as electrical systems were concerned. Mercedes for example still used ceramic open fuses years after plastic sealed fuses were the automotive standard. VW was essentially bankrupt in the late 70's and 80's because golfs, dashers (passats) and jettas were nightmares. BMW which was the most reliable of the 3 was not stellar either. The Ford (merkur) and GM (opel) vehicles that were sold here occasionaly were so bad that they never lasted more than a single model cycle. Ergo, European cars have never, never been reliable. We don't even have to mention Fiats, Renaults, Peugeots, Triumphs or Jaguars which were all absolute pieces of crap. The only thing that ever was notable about European cars was performance since they were designed to operate on higher speed roads they always handled better than american vehicles. Till toyota introduced cars such as the Corona and Celica and Hondas Civic and Accord nobody knew what reliability was!!!!! More to the japanese fortune, they were introducing solid cars when detroit was building the infamous K and X cars which have probably been some of the worst cars ever built.
02-07-2005, 02:02 PM
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Originally Posted by fasttl
The ugly truth is that german cars have never been reliable (except bimmers). German reliability is not a legend it has always been a myth. In fact till the 70's when toyota and honda came along all cars were unreliable if looked at by todays standards, thats why there were so many weekend grease monkies. Carburation, mechanical distributors,brakes and so on were always in need of "tuning". Mercedes, porsche and VW were reliability liabilities especially as now as far as electrical systems were concerned. Mercedes for example still used ceramic open fuses years after plastic sealed fuses were the automotive standard. VW was essentially bankrupt in the late 70's and 80's because golfs, dashers (passats) and jettas were nightmares. BMW which was the most reliable of the 3 was not stellar either. The Ford (merkur) and GM (opel) vehicles that were sold here occasionaly were so bad that they never lasted more than a single model cycle. Ergo, European cars have never, never been reliable. We don't even have to mention Fiats, Renaults, Peugeots, Triumphs or Jaguars which were all absolute pieces of crap. The only thing that ever was notable about European cars was performance since they were designed to operate on higher speed roads they always handled better than american vehicles. Till toyota introduced cars such as the Corona and Celica and Hondas Civic and Accord nobody knew what reliability was!!!!! More to the japanese fortune, they were introducing solid cars when detroit was building the infamous K and X cars which have probably been some of the worst cars ever built.
One of those rare occassions I really should have listened to my dad has he was very against me purchasing the car, but what the hell most 18 year olds no more about cars than their dad.
Can't imagine VW was any worse but at the time they had the dubious distintion of being dead last in reliability as my Merkur shared the dealership with VW. Talk about a dealer selling pure junk.
02-09-2005, 09:09 PM
#24
Originally Posted by 999999
After we got our fourth recall notice on our 99 volksagen Passat wagon, I told my wife to just wait for the next one and kill two birds with one stone. #5 showed up today. Get this - the letter is dated June 2003.
More recalls on this car than on all 7 honda/acura products we have owned. And thousands in repairs unrelated to waraanty items.
More recalls on this car than on all 7 honda/acura products we have owned. And thousands in repairs unrelated to waraanty items.
02-09-2005, 09:46 PM
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Originally Posted by LessisBestmakingendsmeet
Well it ain't much better here. Acura Serviceman's number is now on speed dial. So sad....
I dare you to go trade your tl in on a Passat
02-12-2005, 09:48 AM
#27
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I just traded in a '00 VW Golf GTi VR6 for my new TL. The car was awesome to drive. Especially after the shocks/springs went in. But the car was absolute crap when it came to reliability. As a matter of fact it actually broke down on the way to pick up the new TL when it came in. It only needed to make it another 12 miles....I will never ever consider a German car again.
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02-12-2005, 11:41 PM
#28
an Acura has-been
Every car right now is having problems, none are problem free, even the early TL's had many software revisions, and had problems with the memory seats. Nav system changed op system revisions early on, have other things croped up.
I am at the point that I would not keep any car beyond the waranty! Also, I expect to reprogram the car a few times over it's life.
I am at the point that I would not keep any car beyond the waranty! Also, I expect to reprogram the car a few times over it's life.
02-12-2005, 11:50 PM
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Cruisin'
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Western MA
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Originally Posted by need4spd
Every car right now is having problems, none are problem free, even the early TL's had many software revisions, and had problems with the memory seats. Nav system changed op system revisions early on, have other things croped up.
I am at the point that I would not keep any car beyond the waranty! Also, I expect to reprogram the car a few times over it's life.
I am at the point that I would not keep any car beyond the waranty! Also, I expect to reprogram the car a few times over it's life.
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