Hi folks, recently had a massive trawl through YouTube and found one of the worst horror stories I have ever come across, the company is called Vag Technic and they have done multiple videos on the V6 petrol engines fitted to the later RS4s and the Q7, it would appear that Q7s suffer with timing chain and cam gear failure due to the fact that the electronically controlled oil pressure on idle is so low it starves the gears of oil and causes premature wear and gear failure, the car concerned had 80k on the clock and was booked in to have the chains replaced as preventative maintenance quoted at £3000 and once inside the engine they discovered the cam gears were worn as well therefore they had to fit new cams only available from Audi at £4000 for both banks plus gaskets and seals, total £12,000 plus a remap for the oil pressure system which should make it last longer and the reason for the low oil pressure, yeah you got it, to cut down on the emissions as there is less friction caused by the oil pressure when idling, we then come to the RS4 of which they had two in both with the same problem, one had 60,000 on it and the other 26,000, the lower milage car had a scrap engine in the end and the higher milage they fixed, both had suffered cam follower failure except the lower milage engine had flipped a follower which jammed itself into the opposite side which held the valve open whilst beating the piston to death, hence the catastrophic failure, Audi apparently send vehicles like this to their company because no one wants to spend £25,000 up on a replacement engine which apparently will do the same thing again at some point soon, all third generation V6s fitted to VAG cars are suspect and depending on which model have built in failure points, therefore the lower milage car was apparently worth around £39,000 and as the guy doing the commentary said why would you buy something thats going to cost telephone numbers to repair sooner rather than later, if you are in the market for this type of engine I would seriously suggest this site as part of your in depth research.

Steve.

Wowsers, I'm convinced the manufacturers are doing all these things to deliberately cost the customer or write the car off. It's no hidden information the manufacturers make more money from parts and repairs than the car sales. 

If the governments cared about the environment they would legislate that cars should be simple to repair with the emphasis on manufacturers manufacturers providing parts and vehicle life of 30+ years. 

We know this won't happen due to greed and corruption. 

I can easily believe the defect came about because of scrimping or negligence during development and testing.  At one time I would not then have believed there could be a VAG conspiracy to cover it up, but since Dieselgate it seems anything is possible from such a despicable company.

37 minutes ago, Steve Q said:

Wowsers, I'm convinced the manufacturers are doing all these things to deliberately cost the customer or write the car off. It's no hidden information the manufacturers make more money from parts and repairs than the car sales. 

If the governments cared about the environment they would legislate that cars should be simple to repair with the emphasis on manufacturers manufacturers providing parts and vehicle life of 30+ years. 

We know this won't happen due to greed and corruption. 

Hi Steve if you look at these videos all the major problem seem to be camshaft orientated and very expensive, also the parts are nearly always on back order, the guy also makes an interesting point that the new parts are a different number which leads him to believe that they are a revised version [uprated], they obviously know they have a problem but rather than admit it its easier to sell pairs of camshafts at £2000 a pop, they also pointed out that some of the cam sprocket timings were out from the factory, they can't have moved as they are held on with at least three bolts, I think this is a conscious effort to build such crap fossil fuelled engines everyone will want overpriced electric cars and we all know about them, BYD which stands for Burn Your Dreams along with Tesla that have a habit of spontaneously combusting, we definitely had the better years with cars, you might get a job in a few years counselling Audi owners who have bankrupted themselves trying to keep these things running.

Steve. 

Couldn't agree more. It's all a corrupted scam. I also heard it stands for burn on your driveway 

BYD just overtaken Tesla for number of cars sold.

Watched a video on youtube from a motoring journalist regarding BYD - he had some very interesting stories regarding this company and it's sales practices.

Won't be long before Chinese cars take over the British market, looking at What Car data in the back of the magazine the number of Chinese brands seem to grow every month.

Mercedes' new CLA i c engined now uses a Chinese built engine as opposed to the Renault engines used previously.

Same as the new Dacia bigster 1.8, it's a Chinese built engine.