'95 A6qa heater core

[Michael Veglia]

I'll echo what Steve Mills posted. I did ours and it wasn't too bad. Time consuming, yes, but a pretty easy job really. Things to think about while you're in there (besides the blower fan) are the stepper motor flap actuators that can only be accessed by removing the HVAC box. They will set error codes in the HVAC controller. In my case the flap motors were done prior to the heater core failing and the blower fan was fine (all the way to over 230k miles). Look for posts by austinado16, his posts were some of the best guidance I could find. I had the Bentley manual (on an optical disc, not a paper copy) and his guidance was more useful.

The word of warning, I had a very hard time finding a heater core that actually fit. The usual suspects (worldpac, etc) heater cores they said would fit have incorrect size fittings for the hoses (too small). I wound up going with my local radiator shop and even they couldn't get one that fit correctly, but they received in a Behr and we wound up shimming the barb fittings with hose material which actually worked quite well and remained leak free. May want to go with dealer. Look up "Carson" in the QW allroad forum, he's a dealer parts guy that will get you great prices on real OE Audi parts and for this job that may be your only sure option (but I went through this quite a few years ago so maybe things are different).

I would not give up on an otherwise good C4 for this. Out of the dozen Audis I have owned over the past quarter century, I still believe the C4 was the best built and most reliable I have ever owned.

Good luck and HTH...

Mike Veglia