ChinaBob
Well-known member
The Dieselgate brouhaha and the fact that I am closing in on one year and a lot of miles of ownership has got me to thinking about what car I would like to have if not the A3 TDI. If Audi buys the car back (big hypothetical, I know) what will I get instead? I honestly can’t think of any car within at least 10 grand of the A3’s price I’d want. A gas A3 would come the closest, but I sure would miss the distant hum of the engine and circling gas stations looking for the diesel pump.
To be sure, the annoyances I singled out in my first post (http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=429795) are still there: the sun visor is still useless and the blind spots to the rear quarters are still big enough to hide a Greyhound bus. I have learned to live with them, checking thrice at odd angled intersections and wearing a hat the makes me look like a half-crazed birdwatcher on safari.
The last 10,000 miles did bring some vexing problems with the electronics that have yet to be resolved. In addition to the Audi Side Assist randomly turning itself off as reported previously, a couple of other things went wrong, most importantly the navigation hung a couple of times just after I put in a destination. At about the same time, my cellphone randomly started refusing to connect to the Bluetooth. I took the car to the dealer who worked on it for a few days and couldn’t find anything wrong: it threw no error codes and they couldn’t reproduce the problems. They completely regenned the system, wiping out all my pins and stored destinations and we’ll see if that works. The only other thing they could offer was possible interference from my cellphone. I think it unlikely, but what do I know? I found and removed the app that was causing the Bluetooth connection problem, I think. The most frustrating thing about all this is that these glitches are so random and occur so infrequently that I can never know if they’ve been resolved or are just waiting for the worst possible time to reappear.
Oh, and then there’s the Audi MMI app for Android. Never all that good but gradually getting better, until the latest version. Complete disaster, too much to rant on about here.
Looking back over my post, I see that I’ve mostly talked about the problems. In reality, though, they are only a small part of owning the A3 TDI and, as I said in the beginning, I can think of no car I’d rather have. I just hope that whatever VW does to address its diesel emissions problems doesn’t screw things up.
To be sure, the annoyances I singled out in my first post (http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=429795) are still there: the sun visor is still useless and the blind spots to the rear quarters are still big enough to hide a Greyhound bus. I have learned to live with them, checking thrice at odd angled intersections and wearing a hat the makes me look like a half-crazed birdwatcher on safari.
The last 10,000 miles did bring some vexing problems with the electronics that have yet to be resolved. In addition to the Audi Side Assist randomly turning itself off as reported previously, a couple of other things went wrong, most importantly the navigation hung a couple of times just after I put in a destination. At about the same time, my cellphone randomly started refusing to connect to the Bluetooth. I took the car to the dealer who worked on it for a few days and couldn’t find anything wrong: it threw no error codes and they couldn’t reproduce the problems. They completely regenned the system, wiping out all my pins and stored destinations and we’ll see if that works. The only other thing they could offer was possible interference from my cellphone. I think it unlikely, but what do I know? I found and removed the app that was causing the Bluetooth connection problem, I think. The most frustrating thing about all this is that these glitches are so random and occur so infrequently that I can never know if they’ve been resolved or are just waiting for the worst possible time to reappear.
Oh, and then there’s the Audi MMI app for Android. Never all that good but gradually getting better, until the latest version. Complete disaster, too much to rant on about here.
Looking back over my post, I see that I’ve mostly talked about the problems. In reality, though, they are only a small part of owning the A3 TDI and, as I said in the beginning, I can think of no car I’d rather have. I just hope that whatever VW does to address its diesel emissions problems doesn’t screw things up.