Passat 2000 1.8 Turbo automatic - seams as blown engine

I live in North County of San Diego and my Passat had “STOP” on for over a year. I had oil in it but can’t do #K repirs that dealer proposed. Now supposed it is blown. What do u recomend, - to repir to replace, I have no idea (I am a female know nothing about this stuff but need a car).



Or maybe it can be rebuild maybe damage is not so bad? How would I handle this without being ripped off?

If I am interpreting your post correctly, you drove the car for over a year while a “STOP” warning light was illuminated on the instrument panel. Is this correct?

Anyway, if the only repair facility that you have dealt with thus far is the VW dealership, you owe it to yourself to have the car towed to an independent VW specialist. Most communities have an indy VW specialist, simply because VW dealers are reknowned for poor customer service and extremely high prices.

If you can find an independent mechanic who specializes in the unique problems of VWs, then you should be able to have the car’s problems diagnosed properly and–hopefully–fixed at a much lower cost than the dealership would charge.

However, I would hope that in the future, you would abide by the “STOP” warning light, as continuing to drive with that light lit up can only add substantially to your repair costs.

I’m not sure anyone here can give you advice on repairing versus replacing without knowing exactly how bad the damage is.

At this point, your best bet is probably to have the car towed to a good local independent mechanic (not a chain) and have them give you an estimate, which will hopefully beat the dealer’s estimate. Unfortunately, you can’t really hit several shops to compare estimates unless you want to pay a lot for towing and diagnosis, so you’ll probably have to stick with the first place if it sounds at all reasonable.

Perhaps this is obvious now, but continuing to drive the car in this condition wasn’t a very good idea. The initial repair (whatever it was) may not have been cheap, but the repair now is going to be many times that price.

REPLY to VDCdriver:

Yes, u are correct: I drove this car with “STOP” on for about a year. I know what you maybe thinking about it but to my defence: I did take it to a dealer (and yes I used dealer mostly) for diagnosis and was told I have sludge and recomended repairs would be around 3K. Other parties told me: sludge can be fixed with $5 additive (I added that) and syntetic oil (which I use anyway) and this dealer just tries to ripp me off.
By “other parties” I mean salesman at NAPA shop and others. I was also told that Passat known for faulty sensors so that means my sensor could be just faulty. Because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to drive for over a year with truly low oil pressure.

So I took my chance.

Thank you for your guidance …

So far I checked diff shops for a price of used engine and price of installation:

I am getting a range from $1000 for an engine + $300 to install
to $4K for an engine and $400 to install.

That is a big range… Any suggestions?

Just so we can get a few more laughs, please tell us about the last 1/2 hour of your engines life…Was there a lot of noise and smoke with the car jerking and wrenching around of did it die peacefully, silently gliding to a stop, never to start again…You never mentioned the mileage on this marvel of German engineering, but I would go with the $1000 salvage yard engine and forget the turbo…But since we are all almost as ignorant as you, this is just a wild shot in the dark…