1976 Audi Fox from North America - Comments

Electrical problems (numerous)

Chassis & body problems (everything broke; crappy paint)

Fuel injector problems (impossible to keep maintained.

I have owned many cars in my lifetime (I'm now 52) but this... this Audi Fox.. has to be the Worst of the Worst of the Worst...i.e., this was the worst car I have ever owned! (Yes, even less reliable than the battered ol' Hillman Minx I drove in high school.)

And, the most expensive car I have ever owned (even though it was given to me!). Beats me how such a tiny little car could cost so much per pound.

Can't agree more with the assessment of this "car". My father had one in the mid 1970's and it was undoubtedly the worst and most unreliable that he ever had. It looked good when he bought it (from a VW dealer - it was about 18 months old) but when he sold it about a year and a half later, it was a different story. The paint crazed, the dashboard split in three places, the chrome peeled off the front bumper, the driver's seat partially collapsed, the plastic ends on the bumper fell off somewhere and were never seen again, as did a couple of bits of chrome trim. The only thing I can say in its favour is that I can't remember there being any rust in it, but then maybe he didn't have it long enough for that to show up. The engine overheated several times for no apparent reason and every time we put petrol in it we had to fill it with oil as well (so much so that it might as well have had a two stroke engine!). My father was (and still is) a member of a motoring organisation that provides road service for breakdowns. He certainly got his money's worth out of the membership fees when he had the Audi.

After he sold it he bought a Ford.

What do you expect from an old car?

If you took the "lower class" car from any other company in the 70's it would have the same problems, if not more.

Unfortunately, this first generation of Audi 80 (Fox in America) was not the greatest thing on wheels. I own one today and it is a dog to service compared to a RWD car. Parts are getting hard to find (good reason NOT to buy one) and some weaknesses are chronic : as mentioned early cooling system with tiny radiator overheat, oil consumption in engines with relatively low mileage, weak ignition switches, go-kart rear suspension (thumpy with little travel, dont try loading the trunk) all conspire to make this car obsolete by todays standard. It was actually obsolete by 1985 standards. But hey, maybe you get lucky with one so buy it for next to nothing and see what happens. Good luck

'75 Fox was absolutely the worst car I have ever had. When everything worked, it was great. Problem was, something was always going wrong. Electrical problems can't be counted. Classic example was the electric cooling fan seizing up on I-95, shorting out the wiring harness, causing great black smoke through the a/c outlets. Towed vehicle to dealer where they discovered - duh - there was no replacement wiring harness for '75 Fox made by Audi. Dealer juryrigged a concraption to replace. Collected the insurance, bought a plastic Jesus to put on dash for protection, and quickly traded it in for what proved to be a more reliable vehicle. Wouldn't have been much worse off if I had bought a Yugo; at least with a 6 volt electrical system the smoke wouldn't be as dense. Have another story about Midas replacing the muffler & the battery installed in trunk, with plastic vent tube located next to catalytic converter (which for some reason got hot whenever car was driven) - but that's another post.

Our 1976 Audi Fox was a wedding present. We owned it for five years until our daughter was born (I refused to let her ride in it). It broke down the first day we owned it. It had a sunroof that blew out the headliner at 1,000 miles. Valve seats, water pump, injectors, clutch, motor mounts, radio, all failed in a very short time. By far the worst car I ever owned and I have driven some of the worst. It was even less reliable than my 1964 vw bus and my 1966 tr4a.

I owned a 75 Fox for 5 years from 1983 to 1988. The worst car I ever owned. The ignition switch was replaced twice, the regulator went out 3 times, the transmission was shot after 70 thousand miles, the headliner fell down, the dash cracked, the gas gauge needle bounced so much you could never tell how much gas you had, it went through numerous carburetors, the shift linkage bushings failed, the wipers were slow, the blower motor was not very powerful, the wiring to the lights often corroded, the radiator fan relay would go out constantly. The parts were way over priced and hard to find. Usually only the dealer carried what was needed. No one wanted to buy them in the 1980's. You almost had to pay people to take them from you. When you went to the junkyard you could find most Foxes that were in there with no body damage. People just gave up on them.

I had a '76 Silver Fox I bought new in November of that year. It's a toss-up as to whether that or the '73 100LS I traded for it was the worst car I ever owned. Both of them were a reliability nightmare. But there were excellent things about it, too. I'll list those first.

Considering previous comments, I must have gotten very lucky on some of the components.

The fuel injection never had a problem in the 8 years I had the car. It was always great.

The manual transmission and clutch were trouble-free. No problems with them.

I had to replace the front shocks, but that's pretty normal.

The vinyl seats looked and felt good to the end.

Now, the problems.

Like the 100LS, very early in its life (around 10K miles) it started burning oil. There was always a supply of oil and a filler in the trunk.

It couldn't stand very cold New England winters. Even while running on the interstate, the fuel line would freeze, and in a very bad way. The excess return fuel line to the gas tank would freeze solid, so what would happen is the excess gas would be dumped into the crankcase. So, once you were froze up, it wasn't a simple matter of thawing it out. You needed an oil change. The dealer suggested putting cardboard in front of the radiator. Phooey!

The A/C was a nightmare. Replacing those bushings on the compressor was a frequent and expensive proposition. I heard more squealing fan belts on that car! Then, there was the electrical problem with the A/C. It seems that the fuse block just couldn't handle the current that the radiator pulled for very long, and it warped from the heat.

And, the paint was faded and ratty-looking after about 5 years.

Add to this the fact that I ran into at least three dealerships that provided downright incompetent mechanical service. Don't get me started. Suffice it to say that twice I got the car back with every nut and bolt finger-loose. No kiddin'. Glad that I was in the habit of checking things out when I got the car back.

Will I ever consider another Audi? Not on you life, especially because Audi never acknowledged there were problems with the Fox and the 100LS.

Today I'm a very satisfied, loyal, and dedicated Celica driver.

Many cars with 100K miles are ready for the junkyard today as well. Take a peek around this site and you'll se people with 40-50.000$ cars with 50K on them having serious trouble. Maybe the engine isn't worn down, but the engine is only one of the parts in a car. It doesn't help if your engine is OK so long all kinds of electrics and electronics are failing and your interior is falling to pieces. Another problem with modern car (from the nineties and especially the last ten years) is that it's impossible to do even simple work or maintenance.

So today you may have a eight to ten year old car with no rust and little engine wear, but still it's better to send it off to the junk yard because it need a new 2200$ ABS job or 3000$ electronics job after the battery short circuited (real examples, both cars were sent off). There simply is a lot of unreliable parts in a newer car. Get my drift?

Bought a silver blue '75 Fox in '78 because we thought they were so cool looking and after all cost less than a BMW! Man, what a terrible car. Used more oil than gas. Seemed to literally go right out of the engine without a trace. No one could ever figure out why, then after we unloaded it a year later onto some poor unsuspecting soul who was as thrilled as we were we found out from a mechanic it was a problem with many of them from that year that Audi had tried to simply ignore. There was a flaw in the front of the block that could literally become a spigot and there went the oil. And when it wasn't blowing out the front of the engine it was burning out the tailpipe in the thickest smoke you've ever seen. Head was fine, rings were fine, everything was just fine. This car defied all the known laws of automotive engine mechanics.

We liked the color.

I was one of the few to get one of the cars that worked I guess.

I bought a 1976 Fox new and kept it until 1991. It had 255,000 miles on it when I traded it in.

The only problem I ever had was a connector in a plug to the fuel pump became intermittent.

I just found this site and can't resist adding a comment. In 1973 my wife and I purchased a new Audi 100 LS. We loved that car and had no real trouble with it. After four years and extensive annual travel between Virginia and New Hampshire, we had more than 80,000 miles on the odometer so decided to trade it on a new model.

Unfortunately, the new version of the 100 LS (was it a 90 or a 5000?) was more than we could afford so we bought a new Fox. It was a nightmare car. Lots of repairs, very quirky. After four years it started to rust around the wheel wells. By the sixth year, unbeknown to me, the body had started to rust away from the chassis. On my way to the train station one day I turned in one direction and the body of the car shifted in the opposite direction. Had I not been traveling at slow speed I wonder if the body could have separated entirely from the chassis.

I had it towed to the junk yard and watched them strip the wheels off and drop it at the top of a large pile of junkers. I owned one more Audi - a 5000 - that experienced the "runaway" phenomenon that Audi claimed was the result of inexperienced drivers. We sold it and now own only Volvo and BMW.

You are mentioning a lot of Mopar hardware here and most of the cars you mention was mechanically rather bulletproof, but with almost no rustproofing. But how do you synchronize those Mopar SixPack after running some years. Further you really can't say the attention to details in these cars was especially good with trim parts falling off all the time and with panel fit looking like it was a drunk monkey that had assembled it. Even an amateur restorer can usually get a better finish compared to that when they left Detroit. Cars of the seventies was not especially good, but they were simple and you could work on them yourself. Anyhow with current gas prices I'm glad that era is over.

My family owned quite a few of them. The thing to remember is that these were not gas and go cars. In the design sense they were way ahead of their time. They didn't just look cool, they were some of the original 4 cylinder front wheel drive, unibody, macphearson strut vehicles on the roads here. Obviously the enginering was behind the design.

74 Brown/tan 2 door automatic. Our first..

This was boilerplate for comments added previously. Overheated on the way out of the dealership. The automatics were primitive compared with modern GM hydramatics, and it was a totally herky jerky experience.

73 Green/tan 2 door 4 speed. Belonged to my 7th grade art teacher.hottie.then purchased by my brother. This was a Tuesday wednesday thursday build. This one ran so well, and was so trouble free, saving the madatory 80K valve job, nice.

74 Blue/tan 2 door 4 speeed. My first, reliable, besides 2 alternators and a clutch at 90K. No trouble, uneventfull. Had a different more restrictive exhaust than the 73.

I have one now. I'd like to give it to someone who would actually fix it up (maybe because they have every other old car in their collection except this one...). It still runs, but doesn't go in reverse (not sure if its the original transmission or the gear shift linkage which no longer has any "spring" in its step). Yep, the interior has cracked over the years as has the dash (I mask these over with dash and seat covers).

I notice when I used to go to junk yards for parts that the same parts always had problems... The gas floats and heater valves always needed replacement and finding the huge rubber boot that goes over the CIS system was almost impossible. If found, it was likely all distended just like mine (the 75 had two models, one with a rubber boot, and the other with a plastic formed 'boot' over the fuel chamber). God bless the internet. I once found a part I needed in a New York junk yard (Pick-a-Part in California no longer had any Audi Foxes). --Bought it and got it in short order.

I wonder if I'm the last person to have one of these. Mine is now 32 years old...

One good thing is (being a California Car) --its so old it no longer has to be smogged...

Hello, my name is Shawn and I owned a 1975 Audi Fox 2 door coupe when I was 16 years old. The Fox was my first car. It was written off and I have never been able to find another one. It was the best car I'd ever owned. If you still have it, please contact me. My email address is bubba_00@hotmail.com and I am located in Vancouver, BC and would be more than willing to drive out to California to pick it up. Thank you very much.

Shawn.