maintenance items?

[Roger M. Woodbury]

Ok, ok, ok.  It HAS been a long winter here in Maine, albeit not terribly
cold.  Right now it is blowing like mad and raining like crazy, and I am
thinking about the couple of comments that I read made by listers referring
to the cost of upkeep of an Audi.    I have decided to throw the following
"cat" into the bag of "dogs"....

Expensive maintenance on Audi's is a myth, and the cost of maintenance
overall, depends upon the driving style, degree of savagery with which the
car is treated and the extent of maintenance and properness of it.

There!  I said it.

My first Audi was a new Audi Coupe (1982).  Wonderful long distance car if
you live in, say, Florida or Texas.  Relatively economical to drive, and
absolutely impervious to bad weather....this was non-Quattro, I might ad.
But over Maine's interesting collection of rural roads, the stiff
suspension, thinly padded sporty seats, and fourteen inch wheels made it
ride like a buckboard.  Since I was driving long distance to see clients,
the car wasn't a happy addition.  Also, the body work quality was poor, and
one rocker seam was starting to corrode after the first winter.  Disgusted
with the car overall, in terms of its utility for MY use, it went away at
16,000 miles.

My first Audi was a 1985 wagon, two wheel drive. Brand new.  It wasn't a
particularly well built automobile, and was long on engineering and long
distance comfort, and kind of over matched by city driving.  In the first
year, we had one window regulator (right passenger front) fail, and by the
time we had 20,000 miles on it, we had had to have new front brake pads AND
rotors.  The dealer's shop foreman confessed that Audi was replacing a lot
of rotors on those cars, as US urban driving seemed to eat them up.  The
actual dollar cost was zero, as everything was covered by warranty.  This
was the second car for us....driven by my wife...and she loathed it.  She
hated the image of an automatic station wagon, so we used all of the above
as an excuse to get her a new, 1987 Porsche 944, which she loved.

My next Audi was sometime later....1992, I think it was.  I borrowed a 1987
5000CS Quattro from a dealer friend of mine for a couple of days.  The car
had more than a hundred thousand miles on it, but I wanted to see what a
Quattro was like.
It snowed that night, and driving out of the yard through the five inches of
snow, convinced me that I was going to own an Audi Quattro.

Seven thousand dollars that car was, with all the books and records in the
glove compartment...or at least it seemed that way.  The maintenance book
showed a perfect service record up to 60,000 miles, but few entries for the
next forty thousand.  I LOVED the car.  A perfect car for Maine's roads and
weather.

But I had quite a lot of trouble with the car.  It ate batteries, and drank
Pentosin.  I think it had some ground issues somewhere.  I had to replace
the rear antenna, and the heated front seats didn't.  I had switched
careers, and was remodeling a large sea captains house about twenty five
miles away, and I used the car for everything from carrying 50 pound sacks
of rock salt and fertilizer to going to the theater.  I paid to keep it
running, and loved every minute in the car.  It was sure, strong, and had
been, relatively, cheap.  The headlights were so bad that night driving was
sometimes a challenge, but basically it was a great car as I made the trip
to the project and back, sometimes four times a day.

After putting a hundred thousand miles on the car, and with over 210 on the
odo, it was starting to really run rough, and I knew that to make it through
inspection the next time, I would have to do the windshield and one
headlight.  Also another alternator and battery were going to HAVE to be
bought, and the steering rack was leaking more seriously.

I donated it to a charity and took what the dealer said it was worth
($5500!) as a tax write off.  Expensive to maintain?  Probably, although it
was so capable and suitable for my purposes, I didn't mind, and except for
the time that the throttle linkage broke after dark, and I had to rig the
throttle open with a shoe lace in order to get home, it never left me
stranded. I figured that if the maintenance that had been done on the car in
the first 60,000 miles had been done in the second 60,000 miles, the car
would probably have been perfect.

So, that's what I went searching for.  A 200 Quattro Avant, with relatively
low mileage and a perfect maintenance history.  After a six month search, I
found the car by accident in Minneapolis.  It was a one owner car, serviced
by the selling dealer from delivery, so the dealer had copies of all the
work orders.  61,000 miles.  I bought it sight unseen and flew out to take
delivery.  $11,000 dollars.  The car was an 89, and eight years old.  Black
with grey leather and nearly perfect.  Seems that it had been used just as a
summer car, as the owners had inherited a LOT of money when the car was
three years old, and had moved to the Florida keys, leaving the Audi in
Minneapolis as a vacation car.

That car went away with 130,000 plus on the clock.  I kept complete service
records on the car, and maintained it exactly as the maintenance book said
to maintain it.  Not counting insurance, excise taxes, tires and fuel, the
maintenance cost on that car through seventy thousand miles was EIGHT CENTS
per mile.

The "new" wagon is a 1994 100CS, bought last summer with 39,000 miles on it.
A one owner car from Kansas City, bought from the BMW dealer there.  I know
that the car was maintained by the book, at the Audi dealer there, and who
owned it.  So far, the cost of maintenance has been aroud $450 as I had to
replace a high pressure hydraulic line about a month after driving it back
to Maine.  The car has been over the road with us, as we drove it to Florida
over last Thanksgiving, so in less than a year, we have accumulated around
12,000 total miles.  It's relatively boring, actually.  Some people think
those cars were slow, but what they really are is not quick....heavy without
a huge amount of low end torque.  Comfortable touring cars, but a bit
sluggish in really heavy traffic.  Since we don't have the kind of heavy
traffic in Maine that they have in, say, West Palm Beach, the car is really
perfect.  $14,000.  My guess is that it will prove to be ultimately reliable
and useful, and that we will keep the car well past a hundred thousand
miles.  So far, it is cheap to operate, and nothing has failed except a
couple of bose speakers and the radio head unit on/off switch.

Also in my garage is a 1993 V8 Quattro, which has just rolled past seventy
thousand miles.  I bought it with 60 plus, and it has required a couple of
"O" rings and some suspension stuff that the dealer split the cost with me
on.  So far, it is proving to be as economical to operate as the wagon in
terms of fuel and day to day use.  I doubt that I will have the car as long
as the wagon, as it isn't as useful, being a conventional sedan, but the
maintenance that the car obviously had in its first sixty thousand miles
will be continued, and frankly, I doubt that it will prove to be more
expensive than any other car of its class.

I have left out of this rant the tale of the 1990 V8 Quattro that I had.  It
supposedly had a perfect service history, but when the car arrived in Maine
by truck, all the records were "missing".  It had had a small accident that
had required some sheetmetal to be replaced that I knew of....I think there
was MUCH more to that story than I was told.  I had to rebuild the
transmission after 6000 miles or so, and I never really felt good about the
car.  On a cost per mile basis, it was a disaster, and my total cost instead
of being five thousand dollars below wholesale, was based on having paid
100% of retail for the car.  Not happy with it, it went away fairly
early...after around fifteen thousand miles, and I actually bled about three
thousand dollars on the deal.

My experience is that if you buy the best example that you can find, and
have all the maintenance records in the car testifying to the fact that the
car has been properly cared for throughout its life, then an Audi will be as
inexpensive to own and operate as nearly any other kind of car.  The trick
is to search for, find, and then buy the "right" car.  My experience is that
if you expect to be able to buy it cheap, you will end up paying for that
one way or another, and if you expect to stumble on a perfect car at the
used car lot down the street, then you will eat a lot of misery along the
way.

Expensive?  Well, that's a relative term.  And of course, if your turbo is
chipped, and your engine is cammed so you can get a cool 300 horsepower at
the wheels, then you WILL eat the big one on maintenance, especially if you
drive it with your foot through the firewall.  But used as they were
intended and carefully kept after, I doubt that these cars are any worse to
maintain than, say, your basic Honda Accord, which, by the pound, are pretty
pricey, too.

Roger