VW diesel fix and part shortages

[bungeejumper]

Oh great. The wife's 1.6 diesel Golf ground to a limping halt the other day because the EGR valve had failed. And my garage tells me that he can't find a source for a new EGR, and nobody, including VW, can give him even a vague delivery date. Looks like I'll have to keep the car on the drive until he can get hold of one.

The cause - to me anyway - does not come as any great surprise. It seems that, ever since VW started doing the emissions fix last year, thousands of motorists have seen their EGRs and DPFs failing, and the supply chains have simply run out of spares. You mess with the combustion, and you raise the chances of gumming up the works. How hard is that to understand? www.hypermiler.co.uk/dieselgate/the-vol ... ssions-fix.

For the record, we can't blame VW for our own problem because we hadn't had the fix done yet, but the parts shortage itself seems likely to have been caused by the fix. (Either that, or it's a mighty funny coincidence.) Will investigate further.

BJ

[BT63]

How many miles/years did your EGR last and what kind of driving does the car see?

[bungeejumper]

How many miles/years did your EGR last and what kind of driving does the car see?

Thanks. It's done 70K (seven years old), and just about all its journeys are good healthy legs of 10 miles and upward. Has been maintained by a trusted independent garage for the four years we've had it, so we're not necessarily expecting magnanimity from VW. But this is infuriating!

BJ

[bungeejumper]

Grrr. According to Honest John, the emissions fix itself might not actually cause a problem, but it flushes out any existing weaknesses in the EGR or DPF because they get much more intensive use after the fix. From an owner's point of view, it's the same thing really - the car suddenly doesn't go, and you can't get the spares. Now, what was that about owners not being inconvenienced?

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/answe ... sions-fix-

Grrr again.

BJ

[redsturgeon]

Grrr. According to Honest John, the emissions fix itself might not actually cause a problem, but it flushes out any existing weaknesses in the EGR or DPF because they get much more intensive use after the fix. From an owner's point of view, it's the same thing really - the car suddenly doesn't go, and you can't get the spares. Now, what was that about owners not being inconvenienced?

http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/askhj/answe ... sions-fix-

Grrr again.

BJ

I feel for you, I have run VW diesels but they were long gone before the current problems surfaced.

That was an interesting answer from Honest John, it came across as a bit of a PR piece for VW tbh, less than one in a thousand problems after the fix and mostly minor, mostly now fixed.

The elephant in the room to me is this, if there was a way to programme the engine so that it ran cleanly with no loss of power, no increase in consumption and no other bad effects, then why was this not how they were programmed in the first place.

I have little doubt that problems will plague these "fixed" engines for the rest of their lives. What a complete shambles.

John

[9873210]

The elephant in the room to me is this, if there was a way to programme the engine so that it ran cleanly with no loss of power, no increase in consumption and no other bad effects, then why was this not how they were programmed in the first place.

One possible answer is because they didn't know about it in the first place and they do now.

As an engineer working in an entirely unrelated field:

We don't stop working on a product when it is released. We continued endurance testing in the lab, and continue development for cost reduction, niche applications and succeeding models. We also learn things from warranty issues, sales reps and any public (academic, supplier, even competitor) work in related areas. We apply this new knowledge to incrementally improve new production, the last batch off the production line is usually quite a bit better than the first. We have occasionally done field retrofits to address particular customers or global issues.

So it is not impossible that VW has found a better set of control rules that improve emissions without hurting anything else. Presumably VW engineers have been looking hard since the scandal broke and you won't find something until you look. But "not impossible" is a long way from saying that's what happened, and VW should still be asked to prove it, possibly by putting their money on the line and extending a warranty.

[oldapple]

BJ and others, my OH is rather grumpy about this too. We have the same VW as your wife, which was 'mine' till it let me down too many times. Then it became 'his' as my short trips were being blamed - till the same thing happened to him several times over, no matter how long the journeys. You might know of a Facebook forum set up to highlight the issues (I don't follow Facebook) but OH says to search 'Volkswagen diesel customer forum (emissions scandal)' and you'll find some other unhappy customers discussing the problems. From the gist of what I keep well out of (too heated), the 'fix' doesn't fix, and for some people, VW have denied responsibility for subsequent problems.

[bungeejumper]

Late update: We've just heard from our independent garage that the missing EGR valve for our Golf is due in on Friday, and that we can get it fitted to the car on Monday. It'll have taken two and a half weeks for the part to arrive from the date it was first ordered.

It could have been worse, I suppose. But here's a funny thing. The EGR valves aren't made by VW, but by component suppliers like Valeo. Fair enough. But VW have told my garage quite openly that they've been sending all the EGR valves to their own franchised dealers in preference to independents, which have been forced to wait their turn until some become available.

Isn't that what they used to call a constraint of trade? I thought those days were over?

BJ