Every time I take my A4 in for a routine check, I end up looking at a bill in excess of a grand.

Is this normal for Audi's, is it just the condition of my car or do I just look like a sucker?

I just took in my A4 for an oil and filter change today, and received the following recommendations :

Timing belt - $1008 / water pump - 741.50
Cam seal tensioner - $595
Upper control arm bushings 1 side - 278.50

Do these numbers look reasonable? The guy did show me all the problems to his credit, and there was a prominent oil leak when I looked under the car
with the car raised on the hydraulic lift.
The bushing was indeed cracking on one side.
and the water pump leak was also visible.

I also did call up another mechanic and got a similar estimate of 1800 all inclusive.

Any recommendations on what I should do? I am looking to sell this car anyway, since I will be moving out of the country soon. Net-net will I be better off having the work done and selling or just selling it (assuming that the purchaser will factor in the work when he gets the car examined)?

Any advice much appreciated.

Regards,
Shekar

Audi's are expensive to maintain because zee Germans who built them never intended for their owners to do any of that stuff themselves. Most people are intimidated by the complexity of these cars, and therefor are willing to pay people obscene amounts of money to fix ****.

As far as selling your car, that all depends. More than likely, you're not going to be able to recoupe all of your repair costs when selling the car. That said, if you try to sell the car w/o repairing this stuff, an informed buyer will DEFINITELY haggle with you on price if he knows this stuff hasn't been done.

Yes as CCA4 mentioned the Germans don't want you to mess with there machine and I do work on my own with a friend who specializes in Audi/ VW/ Porche.

Parts are a killer and I did do my own timming belt,tensioner, cam seals & water pump and that is a ball busting 8hr job which entails taking the front end off the car for ease of access.

Your price quoted can be less if you have all that related work done at once.

I don't know if you have a 1.8T but if your pump is leaking then I suggest you cease driving the car as the coolant is getting on the belt and it's going to throw the belt off
and the pistons will tag the valves and cause the short skirted pistions to **** in the bore and destroy the engine in an instant!

See how much the car is worth after that.

those prices are only accurate if your doing them at separate times. when you replace the timing belt, you need to remove the whole front end of the car which is why labor is so high, the book says it takes about 7 hours. normaly you replace the water pump at the same time because you will also have to remove the whole front end. the water pump itself isnt more then $50-100 bucks, and if the car is already apart it only takes another 20 minuets to install. timing belt kits, which include all the hardware needed and the water pump/thermostat, run from between $150-300 depending on what they come with.

if you brought your car to the shop and said 'replace my timing belt and water pump at the same time' and they told you its going to be $1k for the TB and $750 for the WP- smack that idiot in the face and dont go back. if you are doing the two jobs at two separate times, you will be paying twice for the labor. but theres no reason to do that.

I am looking at getting an A4 1.8t with 80k miles and the mechanic I talked to gave me an estimate of $1050 for pump, timing, and cam seal.

yea dude like the other people said do some of the work yourself, its not hard just time consuming...like oil change and filter dude thats cake go to autozone and get a good 5 qts. of full synthetic oil and a filter, i think they have a deal for like 25 bucks for all this..i and i agree tell em to do everything at once when i got my timing belt done they did the timing belt, bearing and water pump all at once, theyre supposed to do it like that...and it was like $495..

hey peeps... just putting my input in here...
i got a bunch of stuff done to my a4 2.8 wagon for a good price..

timimg belt kit from ecs tuning -which includes everything you should replace.. water pump all the seals and a lot more..
this little shop new my town charged me 1200 bucks for the following..

timingbelt and
waterpump with all the odds and ends
a wheel bearing
flexi pipe on exhaust
oil changer

i thought i got a decent deal...