Perhaps VW has upped their game after the Dieselgate Scandal, putting profits ahead of the environment, I don't know as I say "never again".
I can only speak to my wife's Golf TDI Mk IV. She loved the car, and while we never had trouble with the engine nor manual gearbox, I really got tired of 'fixing' the little things.
Apparently, the car wasn't intended for use in areas where weather includes "snow".
1. The door seals were a special design that would freeze to the inside of the door, such that opening the door would rip them right off the body, rivets and all!
2. The oil pan was cast aluminum and located at the lowest point of the undercarriage without any protection...a chunk of ice on a residential street was enough to split it open, leaving a trail of black diesel oil in its wake. I changed the pan using VW's proprietary gasket sealer, laying on a dirt floor in sub zero temps. It was a success, until a week later when the car had to be towed to a VW specialist for a different reason, and the tow truck driver ended up cracking the new pan, too.
3. The wipers, rather than 'stall by design' if they were frozen in place or encountered any amount of snow, had slip washers that would allow the motor to run completely disengaged from the wiper arms. Now you have no functional wipers until you pop the caps on the arms and get out your socket set. Not fun when it's below freezing, pre-dawn, and you have places to be. Over-tightening would result in stress on the system in other places.
4. In cold weather, the ECU would perform a resistance test of the glow plugs on startup, but had a software defect that didn't take into account small resistance changes to the harness or connectors, so it would set a check engine light. It may have even aborted the glow plug power routine (why?!). The only fix was a "new" harness at considerable expense.
There were also lots of little user-interface gripes I had with the car, and repairs I'm sure I've forgotten. My understanding is we dodged a real bullet avoiding the automatic trans. I have friends that had New Beetles during the same time and they had to fight VW to honor their powertrain warranty; their experiences were, shall we say, less than stellar.
I can only speak to my wife's Golf TDI Mk IV. She loved the car, and while we never had trouble with the engine nor manual gearbox, I really got tired of 'fixing' the little things.
Apparently, the car wasn't intended for use in areas where weather includes "snow".
1. The door seals were a special design that would freeze to the inside of the door, such that opening the door would rip them right off the body, rivets and all!
2. The oil pan was cast aluminum and located at the lowest point of the undercarriage without any protection...a chunk of ice on a residential street was enough to split it open, leaving a trail of black diesel oil in its wake. I changed the pan using VW's proprietary gasket sealer, laying on a dirt floor in sub zero temps. It was a success, until a week later when the car had to be towed to a VW specialist for a different reason, and the tow truck driver ended up cracking the new pan, too.
3. The wipers, rather than 'stall by design' if they were frozen in place or encountered any amount of snow, had slip washers that would allow the motor to run completely disengaged from the wiper arms. Now you have no functional wipers until you pop the caps on the arms and get out your socket set. Not fun when it's below freezing, pre-dawn, and you have places to be. Over-tightening would result in stress on the system in other places.
4. In cold weather, the ECU would perform a resistance test of the glow plugs on startup, but had a software defect that didn't take into account small resistance changes to the harness or connectors, so it would set a check engine light. It may have even aborted the glow plug power routine (why?!). The only fix was a "new" harness at considerable expense.
There were also lots of little user-interface gripes I had with the car, and repairs I'm sure I've forgotten. My understanding is we dodged a real bullet avoiding the automatic trans. I have friends that had New Beetles during the same time and they had to fight VW to honor their powertrain warranty; their experiences were, shall we say, less than stellar.