There are two pieces of advice I give to every potential VW (or other European brand) owner. The first piece of advice is “Don’t do it, buy something Japanese”. My second piece of advice, which I give to people who didn’t listen to my first piece of advice, is this “Learn how to read a wiring diagram, grow three more elbows on each arm, make sure that your arms are no more than 5 inches in diameter and no less than 8 feet long, and be willing to spend three times more on parts and have the jobs take three times as long”
Maybe all my vitriol for Eurotrash (as I call it) comes from where I work. Every time I’ve tried to work on one, the job has always ballooned into a massive overhaul due to corroded parts. For example, I recently had to do an alignment on a 2004 Audi A4 (which is essentially an overpriced Passat). The design of the tie rods is such that when the jam nut corrodes onto the outer tie rod and you have to actually use more than just hand pressure, the outer tie rod breaks, rather than just not coming loose (like every other car on the planet that isn’t an Audi or a Passat), and then the inner and outer tie rod has to be replaced. During this particular repair job, the bolts holding the outer tie rod to the knuckle both sheared off, so I had to replace most of the upper half of the front suspension. The job went from a $70 alignment to almost $500 worth of repairs that the customer doesn’t have the money to pay for. The car’s fixed, and the last I saw it is still parked out in front of my shop. It’s possible that the customer is going to come in today and pay their bill so I’ll actually get paid for all the time I have sunk into that piece of junk, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.