Hey guys, I'm looking a buying a car in the next year or so and I'm looking at my options currently. I'm a 20 year old college student, paying my own way, and I've got a budget of 7000. This would be my first car.

From the search here, and the googles. I think I'll be going with the B6 Quattro just because it's newer (I know a lot of people on here like the B5's but I would need the car to be more reliable than fun :/). It seems like the 2004 is the sweet spot, but it seems like I'd be looking at an 01 or 02 based on my budget.

What I would like to know is, based on my situation is $7000 too low of a budget? How much can I expect to spend on the car for maintenance and repair yearly (if such a figure exists).

According to msn autos the Audi A6 Quattro 2001 seems to be reliable and within my price range as well.. I'm wondering if this would be more reliable (in terms of cost) than the A4? We're talking cost here so, would I be pulling this into mechanics more than A4?

I like Audi's, I really do. If I buy a car it'd be either be a reliable beater, or a not so (but much more) reliable Audi. If I can put a figure to the maintenance/repair cost per year it'd be of great help.

 

Maintenance costs vary significantly based on how much mileage you're going to put on the car. In my first year with mine ('02 A4 1.8TQM), I did ~20K miles, but since then, I've moved much closer to my job, and am commuting less than half the distance I used to, so both the scheduled services and the random occasions when things just break have been fewer and farther between.

In my first year with mine, I had to do the following (this is from memory, so it may be off by a bit, but it should give you some idea):

5x oil change, 4 quarts of Mobil 1 0w40 every 5K miles, plus I had one done right when I bought the car to be sure it had fresh oil: $60 per, $300 total
Vac leak found & fixed: $80
replace rear brake rotors & pads: $350 or so
timing belt job @71K miles: just under $1000
new tires @ 80K miles: just over $600
80K service: just over $400

So the total, adding these things up, is over $2700 for one year. Now, granted, if you can find one that's not as near to its T-belt change as mine was and/or you don't do as much driving as I did at the time, you won't get hit for $1000 of that any time soon (bought my car with 62K on the clock, so that was my bad), but it's probably not unreasonable to expect to be paying a significant amount for maintenance. As is probably obvious, a big part of that cost was labor; if you can do it yourself, you can save a bundle.

 

I'll be putting maybe 10-15k km's (kilometers ) on it a year. Given the timing belt was done within the last 17k would that be a good deal?

After than initial bump in maintenance cost, how much were you spending when you were driving 10k miles a year?

 

I'm honestly not sure how many miles per year I'm putting on it now, but I know it's a lot less than right when I got the car. I'm still expecting to spend > $1K/year ($1500 would be easy to imagine) on maintenance and repairs, minimum. I'm coming up on my 90K service, and while that's basically a glorified oil change, I'm also about to need new front brakes (more expensive than the rears just because the parts are more), and this winter, I had a coolant leak that turned into a $600 repair, so I'll already be over a grand for the year before anything else happens.

A timing belt done within the last 17K (miles or kilometers) is definitely good - you shouldn't have to do that for another 50-60K miles.