What you should do is take your car to a private mechanic, and have an engine compression and leakdown test performed. This will give you an idea of how the engine is doing in those stats, and see if the car is within or out of spec in that regards.
As for oil burning, there are two ways to burn oil:
- Oil control rings are shot, and allowing oil to be burned in the combustion chamber.
- Oil is being turned into mist, and consumed by the engine via the PCV system.
The first one is harder - build the engine better.
The second one is easier for you to do - install a catch can to see if this is the cause of the oil consumption, or disconnect the PCV system so that the oil mist won’t be consumed by the engine.
Your engine has several strikes against it.
First off, it is a Direct Fuel Injection engine.
On top of that, it has a turbo installed on it.
The combination of these two items leads to raw fuel being forced past the piston rings, which then contaminates the engine oil, which lowers the Flash Point of the engine oil. When the engine oil gets hot, the oil turns into mist A LOT EASIER than fresh clean oil does, and gets sucked into the PCV system, and burned when it gets sucked into the combustion chamber, and further fouls up the compression and oil control rings with carbon.
The biggest cause of the poor performance of these engines is owners who beat on the car when its cold, in the very early stages of the engine breaking in. With a turbo DFI engine, you should never drive the car under boost when it is cold, and the various metals haven’t yet expanded to their proper sizes. This leads to excess wear in the engine, that never can be restores without a rebuild.
What Audi/VW should have done, was install a variable redline in the car when the engine is cold, like what Mazda has done with the RX8. When the engine is first started up, the RX8 has two lights that bring the red line of the car down from 9k rpms to 5500 rpms, and when slightly warmed up, the first light goes out, allowing you to re the car to 7500 rpms. This prevents the owners of the RX8 from abusing their cars when cold, causing increased wear of the engine, leading to increased engine repairs under warranty.
The 5500 rpm restriction goes out very quickly, too. Usually about 5 to 10 blocks, depending on temperature. The second one turns off after about 2 miles of driving, or when the engine thermostat gets opened by coolant temperature.
I believe that if Audi did the same, there would be less problems.
BC.