Hi There, my left axle broke off the bolts last week while driving. my car is 10 years old and had both axles replaces last year. the place that put the axles in refused responsibility, but repaired the axle as I am a ‘good’ customer. Problem is now that the transmission case got damaged while the axle broke off, I had the car first towed to a different garage who told me about the transmission, but as I found out that the axle was the problem I brought it to the place that put the axle in. They said that nothing is wrong with the transmission case, I asked them to state it on the repair sheet. It says only no issues found with undercarriage. Today I saw that the car is leaking, probably from the transmission. What should I do?
After investigating the axles on FWD Beetles can I assume that the inner CV joint broke away from the differential due to shearing off the mounting bolts? If that is correct, did that occur suddenly with no warning? And if correct, at what speed was the car travelling when the break occurred?
After a year and thousands of miles of driving, it’s going to be very hard to lay responsibility for this on the shop that installed the axles over a year ago…Sounds like a poor design to me…Few FWD cars use bolts to secure the drive axles…I would check a factory shop manual to see if any special procedures must be followed when installing new axles, like using new special bolts or Loc-Tite or whatever…
If the shaft broke off at the bolts and stayed intact otherwise then I would say that someone did not properly tighten the bolts or overtightened them which then led to pulling the threads, etc.
Doing something about it after a year is going to be pretty iffy though.
For decades VW has used 8 MM Triple Square bolts to attach CV joints and they’ve worked very well. I’ve never seen or heard of one coming loose, ever.