AHF TDI in the U.S.A.?

Okay, so my younger brother picked up a nice '02 vw Golf with a manual transmission. It had some work done to it, such as an egr delete, vnt17 turbo, and bigger injectors, it ran very well and got surprisingly good fuel economy, but then when he brought it to the local diesel performance shop to get a Malone tune on it, they found out it has the ahf TDI engine. Now from what I'm seeing, the tdi put in the U.S.A. Model golf is the alh, have any of you run across these? How would I know if it was an import from say Germany? Maybe someone swapped it in? Or were some American golfs made with that engine?

It's a mk3 engine from what I read. Factory it has a different turbo and injector setup than the alh. Very possible a lot of your car has been changed to alh style though. I suspect it was swapped in after a timing belt failure.

Hopefully someone with more experience can chime in on this one.


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AnotherPerson said:

It's a mk3 engine from what I read. Factory it has a different turbo and injector setup than the alh. Very possible a lot of your car has been changed to alh style though. I suspect it was swapped in after a timing belt failure.

Hopefully someone with more experience can chime in on this one.


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Okay, a new twist... I looked at the car today and saw that the block says alh, and the timing cover has a sticker on it which is all in German which also says alh. I'm wondering if someone didn't put the electronics from the ahf TDI in, maybe it's injector pump and head? The car isn't from Germany, it's made in Brazil, but it's very different from our alh jetta. It runs very different, so I'm suspecting a different cam.
Maybe a timing belt broke and they put an ahf head, ip, ecm and all?