Hi There, I have an Audi A3 1.8T 2010 which is using excessive oil due to the design fault of the pistons. Has anyone else taken Audi to court re this issue? The car is out of motorplan and wasnt serviced by Audi after MP was up.
My feeling is that it is an engine fault which should have had a total recall and I should have had it fixed by Audi during the warranty period. Audi basically kept this quiet in order to save the expense and are now refuting all claims!
look forward to hearing from anyone with a similar problem.
cheers
Garth ( South Africa)
Well you got me curious. Did a search, found some info on the 2.0L engine, nothing on the 1.8. Warranty was extended to 8 years/80000 miles in response to oil consumption. Whether or not this was would wide was not stated. What little information I could find dealt with seals rather than piston or ring issues.
Your car is now 9 Y.O. so would be out of warranty anyway.
Then there is the question: How much oil is it using? How many mile/km when you need to add a L of oil?
So now it is a financial decision. Keep adding oil or repair at your cost or trade it in.
Having said all that, maybe a South Africa court would see your situation differently.
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Thanks for getting back to me . I am really peeved to say the least , the car has 120 000 kms on the clock and is in immaculate condition obviously apart from the engine , the trade in I have been offered is approximately $4000! I have even have one motor dealership stating that they will not trade this model in .
Audi should have recalled all these models but they did not and chose to keep it under wraps , they have settled some cases but unfortunately I found out about this too late.
To exacerbate things further I never used Audi to service the car when it was out of the motor plan so they are using this to refute any form of compensation .
My fight continues………
Cheers
Garth
For a 9 year old A3 with 120k km… I’d say grab that and rid yourself of the headache.
If you EVER get anything from Audi, it will be long after this car is in the scrapyard. Trade it and move on.
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Still no mention of rate of consumption.
If it’s less than 1L per 2,000km it’s not excessive.
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Multiple US owners of Audis have complained on this site about excessive oil consumption. And, all of them reported that Audi corporate’s response was…
The consumption of 1 qt of oil every 600 miles is considered to be normal for our engines.
Whether Audi of South Africa would have a different policy, I have no clue, but the response from Audi of America certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the engines of these pricey vehicles.
My questions for you are…
How often do you change the motor oil?
How often do you check the oil level?
Most oil consumption issues are caused by the above; or lack of.
I wonder if it is the same problem as I had w/my old VW Rabbit, leaky valve stem seals. VW stepped up to the plate and replaced the seals in that case, but the car was still under warranty at the time. If you car is out of warranty there isn’t much you can do other than hope a class-action lawsuit will ensue at some point to address your oil consumption problem, which seems unlikely to happen. No harm asking of course, maybe someone here has dealt w/this problem.
Going forward I’d recommend when you buy a new car to periodically check for recalls and customer interest bulletins as they are published. One way to do that in the USA and Canada is a single car subscription to All Data. For South Africa there’s probably something similar.
In any event, if the problem is leaking valve stem seals, and keeping the oil topped off is a good solution, that’s usually pretty inexpensive to fix, as the seals can often be replaced w/out removing the cylinder head. If the problem is the piston rings, those are harder to replace, but still could be done without nearly as much expense as replacing the entire engine. If you decide to go the repair route, make sure to tell Audi you’d like to be a continuing customer on your future car purchases , and towards that end ask Audi if they’ll give you a little help on this problem. They might cough up a significant discount for the job, etc.