It took me so long to get a real answer our of Audi... The service interval on the timing belt it 80K/4 years. They start recommending replacement at 60K. I did mine about 70K/9 years. Good luck with a "good lawyer." It will be a waste of money because it is stated in your hand book replacement it 80K/4 Years. Even people that have had this issue before the 80K mile mark tried to sue Audi and Audi's lawyers very easily knocked them down. The belt was a 5 year old belt that had lost 2 teeth and slipped on the top cam shaft.

 

I was doing Jetta/Golf T-belts and rollers in the dealer whenever the wp impellers exploded... usually between 35-45K miles. Our recommendation was to do the t-belt service by 80K on all Audi/VW 4 cylinders.

Sue all you want. I think you should cut your losses, take the gift of the borrowed tools, and fix your car. The service manager is cutting you a BIG break by even offering that. Take it!

 

i understand he's helping me. i might remove the engine thats in it and replace the engine with a built one. im not sure what the verdict is on my finances yet...

Dom

 

my timing went and its almost the worst situation possible. i bent plenty of vavles, and even broke one off and it got imbeaded in the cylinder head. luckly the wall of the cylinder is fine. its just a nice little project right now and its costing a ton.

 

Wow. This sounds fairly bad. I actually came to the site looking for info on timing belts. I'm told (by the dealer) that the location makes them extremely expensive to check and replace. Any thoughts as to when we should be getting checks/replacements? Mine is an '01 A4 1.8T FWD with under 55k miles, but still getting nervous. Thoughts?

 

Milstein I have audi a4 quattro 2000 Tiptronic with 105000 miles. I have just changed my belt for the first time with lots of other parts. This is when audi recommends to change them. People who say to change earlier are the owners of older cars pre 2000 which have a different tensioner and belt. Now it will never hurt to change it but here are my 2 cents. If you change it now you will have to change it again at 110 000. Changing timing belt is very expensive considering lots of other parts are changed as it should. (water pump, 4 belts, tensioner, roller, etc). So change it at 80 or 90k to be safe. Yes there are people who break the timing belts earlier, and according to my research , majority of those have stick shift. If they dont know how to drive stick, things tend to break more often. Save your money for gas, its f***ing expensive now

 

http://www.bentleypublishers.com/tech/audi/

 

way too much attention is being used by the dealers on changing the belt ( blame GM/Vauxhall for that because they get you to change it at 35k for money reasons ) and it depends on how you drive, Audi A4 turbo is an aggressive driven car most times because that's what it was built for but for dealer reasons the change time is 120,000klm/74k,
when the belt snaps the first thing to do is not crank the engine for obvious reasons
second thing is to fit a new belt and do a compression test or simply a manual rotation of the engine should be enough to tell if you had a valve strike,
most times damage is done by cranking the engine when it just died and that the clue to a snapped/stripped timing belt.

take a little time and check the condition of the belt now and then ( rubber dust and oil in that area is a bad omen )

 

Milstein, you're fine. I'm at 74k and I haven't done a timing belt job yet. That's going to be an 80k service

 

I just did the timing belt, water pump & tstat/housing on my 01 1.8TQ @81k. The belt looked glazed on the outside and the tooth side looked dried out. Maybe it was just alittle too soon, but better safe than sorry.