hey everyone ,
As you may notice Im an proud owner of an 1988 Audi 90 5cylinder and an 1989 Audi 90Q 5 cylinder 20v one of which has almost over 200,000miles on the engine and trans and I have owned for 10yrs and do all the maintenance on it myself due to the fact that I'm an auto technician. It just scares me to think that if I decided to buy a A4 of any type or year that It would never be as reliable as my old faithful 5cylinder cars are! By the way my 88' Audi has never had any serious engine work on it since I purchased it with 99,000 miles on it ! This post is in response to budcan's dilemma

 

I have to agree with you there older cars had less problems because of the low tech engines and simple DIY that most could do them selves, new tech and emissions law saw the sensor era like OBD then came OBD2/3 the idea was to make it easy to pinpoint problems easily but it worked better for the garages/dealers because it only gives codes to tell you where the problem could be coming from not the fix, im a diagnostics technician in a way because Ive been doing trouble shooting for over 10 years and have built a pattern up of faults and causes ( I put all the fault codes up and still get asked what it means ) that doesnt surprise me at all because it can get very complicated to explain.

older cars on the other hand were/are simpler and engines made of cast iron so they last well not like today's alloy engines "you could easily tweak carburetters and timing to get better performance and power today's cars require diagnostic equipment for every thing and the sensors on the car go down too much in my opinion but that's the bonus to the manufacturer