7th Jun 2015, 19:06

I sold these Passats for a main dealer at this time, and they were lovely cars to drive and well sorted ergonomically. However as far as reliability was concerned, they were horrific. The faults are as follows and were very common.

1. Failure of dual mass fly wheels at low mileage; as low as 10,000 miles. VW would not cover this, instead blamed the driver.

2. Electric handbrake failure.

3. Fuel tank pump failure in cold weather (very common).

4. Multiple electrical and software issues.

5. EGR valve failure.

These were the main problems, but there were a lot of others. The point is VW are marketing and selling them as a premium product, yet they seem to be sourcing their components from the cheapest sources and they basically don't give a damn about the customer. Customer service from the dealer service depts was always poor because they are so overrun with cars in for warranty claims. Buy Japanese or Korean if you want ultimate reliability!

21st May 2021, 21:51

You guys make good points. The Passat in the UK was always regarded as a reliable car (back in the day). I had 3 of them in the 1990s, an 89 1.8 CL, then a 91 2.0 GT, then a 95 2.0 GL. Excellent cars from times gone by. Post year 2000 Passats however, especially the diesel ones seem to be problematic. To be fair it's not just VW or the Passat in particular; It seems to be modern diesels that are the problem. I know someone in the motor / taxi trade and he says he has replaced the DMF (clutch+ flywheel), DPF, injectors, and EGR valve on all his cars; Mazda 6, Toyota Avensis, Skoda Octavia, Ford Mondeo, Vauxhall Insignia, the list is almost endless. All expensive faults at somewhere between the 50,000 / 100,000 mile mark.

Good news is at higher mileage and age you do not need to go to a dealer and pay their crazy prices ; These faults are SO common smaller independent garages have a good knowledge of how to deal with them. Bad news is they are still quite expensive to fix.

23rd May 2021, 23:28

I had a 1999 which was the previous generation. Germans make their cars hard to service. It's a german thing. Replacing the engine air filter is a 30 min job while on other cars it varies from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

I had to replace the door and window actuators and I actually split the units open to see what went wrong inside. I could not believe how needlessly complicated was the design inside; no wonder a small bit of plastic would break and render the entire unit useless.

I had a leak inside from the space under the wiper motor so I tried to remove the linkage to inspect. So hard to remove the plastic cowl part while on a Hyundai it's a 10 min job. Can't engineers just take a peek at the competition for simple things? It would work exactly the same but it would be 10 times easier to service. And I was never able to remove the wiper linkages. Special male torx heads - the female ones are already more difficult to remove than a regular hex head bolt. Why make things simple when they can be complex? That said, that generation of Passat had its shares of issues with transmission modules, 1.8 turbo needed synthetic by all means, cams, overly complex front suspension arms with multiple ball joints. Lower body panels rust. Still, the car altogether did age pretty well. But the following generation went downhill.