I'm inches away from buying a used '06 2.0T Manual A3. Now that I've spent the last two days researching the car I have doubts.

It seems like there are a lot of people with Oil / Engine trouble as well as serious transmission issues. I've never owned and Audi and the scariest thing about what I've been reading is that it sounds like Audi service is slow and unresponsive.

I've got to know... Does anyone own an A3 and not have serious problems with it??

 

Where have you read that alot of people are having problems with their A3's ?
Alot of these guys from SoCal have 2006 A3's i haven't heard them complain about their rides.

 

I saw a few gripes on this board and a laundry list on the A3 forums on carspace.com. Auto.Yahoo user reviews have a majority of glowing reviews which is nice, but there are a few stories of guys getting stranded on the highway.

I think there were others too - but I can't remember where I saw them.

Admittedly I'm not a big car guy. I've never owned a high-performace car before and it could just be that I'm not sure whats standard. Is a car the burns oil, or that needs oil added every 5000 miles normal?

 

Oil needs to be changed. Some is burned but Audi's are no different than all other cars in the oil department.

Any car you buy you are going to hear bad things about. But I haven't heard a single gripe from anyone on this board or anyone that I know that has an A3. Play the numbers man, you're probably gonna end up with a great car.

 

how many miles on used?

MT cars are usually safe. So easy to keep the tranny in top performance just be replacing the clutch. The engine's pretty good too and has actually been tuned way below its potential. Althought its a relatively new model I dont think this car will have that many problems in the future.

 

I have a 2006 A3 2.0T and it has 13,257 miles on it and i havent had a problem with it yet
i would recommend this car to anyone

 

Just remember, the people posting on these forums tend to be the enthusiats that are more critical of their cars, run their cars harder than most, mod their cars or people with problems trying to solve them. So you are going to read about a lot more problem cars than non-problem cars. I too researched the car before I bought mine last month and the issues I found were isolated, not indicative of a poor engineering. I've only got 2k miles, but still love the car and haven't had any problems.

 

Sweet - Just needed a little encouragement : )

Now I just gotta get the stupid dealer to work out a reasonable price.

 

Good luck, I'm sure you'll enjoy it. A word of caution, get the VIN number and have your dealer service department lookup the service records and get a CarFax report. Before I bought my new car, I was minutes from buying a used one in a different city and called my local dealer with the VIN number to check for service issues and scheduled maintenance. The service department told me it was a buy back car that had the engine replaced - at their shop. They were able to give me the the real lowdown on the car. The CarFax report didn't say it was a lemon car, so the dealer must have done it on good faith. Just approach it as you would with any used car.

 

One thing that I can tell you, that I hope nobody else ever has to tell u, is that this is one SAFE car!! i got into an accident and totalled it and walked away with only a scratch from my watch... the airbags came out and everything. u can see pics of it on the link in my sig