filter quality?

I drive a '98 Seat Ibiza 90bhp tdi, and am planning on servicing my car myself from now on as dealer labour costs are outrageous. are genuine vag filters any better quality than ones made by other companies that are generally half the price?

Personally, filters are one thing I have always trusted dealer only. Once I saw a FRAM next to a dealer filter for my Honda and there were several apparent things that made the Honda look to be a better product. Espeicially since you only replace filters every 16 or 32k, not so hard on your pocketbook.

Coop

VW oil filters are first rate. The OEM suppliers to VW are Mann, Purflux, or one of the Mahle Gruppe names, (Mahle, Knecht, Tecafiltres). So any of the name listed are equal to the VW branded filter.

Brian, 97 Passat TDI

fincoop,

Fram filters were considered decent once, before they were taken over by Allied Signal and they did cost reduction on that cash cow.

Fram is now the poster child of crappy filters and because of this they are the low bidder and make lots of cheap house brand filters. You are right, they such.

But I strongly object that you propose that because you have looked at arguably the worse filters in the market, that one can then only consider the dealer's filters. There are companies that make better filters than the OEM filters. You choose to dismiss this possibilty. Thats your loss. Please don't push that point of view on others.

The VW OEM filters might be much better than OEM filters from other manufactures, I will give you that. And the VW OEM filters could be very much better than many after market filters. But they will not be the best quality that can be obtained.

So what do you recon the best filters are? over here in the uk options are limited, i can either get the original VW filter from a dealer, fram, champion or K+N which is a little more expensive but looks good quality? cheers for your help!

Try one of each-- You make the determination for Your area!