New to the forum. Service light went off in my 2000 Audi A4. It has 76,000 miles and I have been good about service. Did not go to the dealer for this time because I had problems in the past but I did call to see what the 80k and 90k service was and they mentioned timing belt and other stuff and the cost was about $1700. Ouch.

The other mechanic also mentioned that the timing belt was wearing. After doing some research on the timing belt and A4 I realized this could be even more expensive if I don't fix it now due to all the problems relating to timing belts breaking.

Here's the catch. Called back the dealer who pulled up all my service records instead of just telling me what the maintainence included and found out the timing belt was change in July 2006 at about 60-65k miles. So needless to say I did not have the other guys do the work.

My question is:
Could the timing belt really be in that bad of shape if it was replaced 18 months ago? I drive about 12,000 per year which is less then average. Can you really inspect the timing belt without actually pulling the car apart?

My other question:
If it is that bad is there a warranty on doing the work again?

My last question:
The new recommendations is changing the timimg belt every 60 to 70k miles has there been more problems with the replacement belts?

Trying to get a handle on things.

 

well it was probably changed as a precaution. This reason is the previous ower probably had finally saved up te money to get it done and did it sooner than later. In terms of the recomendation of changeing it every 60-70 thousand miles, it is really only going to matter if you drive you car hard, if you drive it normal you could wait another 90000 miles before you change it, but if you drive it hard it is better to do closer to 70000 so you dont have to buy a new head and valve train.

 

You can inspect the timing belt by removing the upper half of the timing belt cover. There is a hose and a vacuumline that run across the front of, so you may have to carefullypull those out of the way.

 

if it was changed at 65k you should be fine. kinda hard to tell if a timing belt is worn, so your mechanic musta just wanted the business.

i would ask the dealer if they did a full replacement with new tensioner, water pump, etc... and not just the belt.

you have the "upgraded" tensioner, which sucks slightly less than the older version, so you should be able to do it every 80-90k, but people just do it every 60-70k as a precautionary thing, cause if it breaks you'll most likely need to rebuild the head

 

yeh, you don't want to have the timming belt break. I am currently working on my red a4 that broke last week. The belt broke at the crankshaft at 76000 miles. That sucks. It bent all of the valves and smacked the top of the pistons. The head is currently at the machine shop getting fixed. I got lucky and it didn't break on the highway destroying the whole thing. The pistons survied it some how with little crunch. They are within spec to be good. Yeh, lesson learned on that one so that I WILL change the timming belt very frequenly on my red and black a4's. I also got lucky that my black one was done right before I bought it, got the stealership record on that. Phewww