Hello to everyone, I'm the newest member here, I just bought a 99 (not sure if its a 99 or 99.5 yet, I pick it up tomorrow and I just read about the 99.5 thing) A4 1.8T Quattro. I'm excited about the car, its real clean, has 113,000 miles on it and the previous owner had a fair amount of work done to it recently, including the timing belt. I paid $4600 for it, which I think is a halfway decent deal. I'm in WI, so I'm definitely looking forward to trying out the awd in the next WI snowstorm! I'm not too big on doing mods, but one thing I'm definitely looking into is switching to HID headlights, my last car, an Acura had HID's and I will definitely miss them. I'll be doing a search on the HID's, I'm sure a bunch of people here have installed them, but if anyone has any advice, I'll take it!

Coming from owning several Acuras, I'm a little leery about the maintenance of the car, that was one nice thing about Acuras, nothing ever really seemed to go wrong with them! I'll be doing more research on the whole "sludge" issue, too. What are some of the symptoms of having a "sludgy engine"?

The one and only issue that the car has is an intermittently functioning gas gauge. The old owner said its usually just stuck on "E", but that occasionally it will go up and then come back down again. This isn't the end of the world, I can just use the odometer to see where I'm at gas-wise, but I'd certainly like to fix it if its something that can be done reasonably. Anyone have any suggestions on this one?

I'm looking forward to picking up the car, I hope it will serve me well!

 

Sounds like I must have the 99.5, as it did have the projector headlights-

 

this is a really easy fix, takes about 30 mins here is a link: http://www.audiworld.com/tech/elec77.shtml the little wire is probably broken in half thats what was wrong with mine, i just used some other wire that i had laying around to put in place of the broken wire good luck

 

Cool, I bet that's the problem. I will give it a shot when I can and update on the results, thanks!

 

That fixed mine awhile back. Clean the electronics with contact cleaner as well while you're in there.

 

Hopefully I'll have time to get to it this weekend. I picked up the car this morning and actually so far, the gauge has been working about 98% of the time. When it does go out, it would instantly drop from 3/4 full (where it should have been) to totally empty. This would lead me to believe that the explanation of a dirty electrical contact or a frayed wire is correct. I'd think if it was a bad float or whatever, that the drop wouldn't be as rapid.

 

on mine it worked fine when the tank was full, but once it hit half way it just kept going down and back up randomly
when you get to fixing it make sure that you have about 1/4 of the tank or less, you dont wona soak your hands in gas :P

 

Mine behaved just like Tourbo24's. Take it to the bank - broken wire or dirty contacts, or a combination of the two. It's the case in about 99.999999999% of these failures.