One thing is for certain: when they break, it is going to be labor intensive to do anything, and parts are not likely to be cheap.
The water pump alone, which is built upon a design that has in its nearly decade long existence, been a constant wallet emptying nuisance for owners, makes my butthole pucker.
And we've already seen how fragile the plastic oil pans are. Dead possum will take one out. Luckily the got by with a $500 bill, as he shut the engine off right away. But geez.... a dead possum? Come on.... if they are that fragile, they should come standard with some sort of metal skidplate on the bottom of the car. The low hanging aluminum pans now almost seem robust in comparison.
At least the Tiggy sits higher, and the Alltrack does too.
I am also not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about the 0w20 oil. My reasoning? Two fold.
First, many of the other manufacturers that have on some engines spec'd a 5w20 or 0w20 oil have already shown us that any and all oil consumption issues will be compounded by the use of a thinner oil. In some cases, engines that already are WELL KNOWN for rampant oil burning problems like Subaru and Mitsubishi and some Toyotas will turn a quart every 2500 mile habit with 5w30 into a quart every 1500 mile habit with 0w20. Subie did at least up the oil capacity, but still, on a fleet of Foresters we regularly service, on a 5k interval (fleet mandated, Subaru says 7500), they all come in with either the oil at the very low tip (below the operating range) on the dipstick, or the dipstick completely dry. Every. Single. One. And these are NEW cars, not some clapped out worn out 150k mile unit. Many VAG gasoline engines have also had some pretty abysmal oil consumption problems, some far worse than others, and this was with a 5w40 spec motor oil on board. And many (most) have a 10k mile interval. If there is no input from the owner to take the reins and keep the oil level topped off, an engine that consumes 1 liter of 5w40 oil every 2500 miles is going to be spending most of its [short] life perpetually low on oil. They simply cannot safely go 10k miles without opening the hood. Maybe they get by with this for the first 50k miles or so, but by then the oil consumption has increased, and ring/breather coking has snowballed, to the point that it becomes a race to see if the engine blows up first or the catalyst dies from trying to deal with being slowly poisoned by all this extra oil. 0w20 will only make this worse. Again, VAG, like others, have increased the oil capacity. Most of the 4 cyl engines went from 4.25 L, to 4.5 L, to 5 L, and now the newest ones are 5.5 L capacity. And they generally have low oil sensors. That is good, and may soften the blow of any increased oil consumption.
Second, the reason as to "why" use a thinner oil. I think most of it is to eek out a wee bit better fuel consumption, not necessarily to aid in start up lubrication for that first 15 seconds. Did they actually DO the fieldwork to insure the thinner oil is actually OK for the engine? Or, more importantly, OK for the engine long term, meaning, beyond its warranty period? Also, just like we used to see with carburetor engines, the oil with DI gas engines, turbo or not, tends to get "washed out" and fuel diluted. So it thins before it thickens. When you drain the oil on many of these engines, it comes out like black 1970s lawn mower oil. Wouldn't it stand to reason that an oil that starts out thinner already will get even thinner yet once this fuel dilution happens? Unscientific for sure, but the Pentosin 5w40 HP2 oil that I drain out of my 170hp 1.8t AWM engine after 10k miles looks and feels more like new oil than the same oil I drain from the "new" 170hp 1.8t engine in a newish Golf or Jetta. And the newer engines hold nearly a liter more oil!
Lots to consider, that's for sure. We have already seen a rapid increase in major mechanical engine damage in some newer engines that get the least bit neglected, and they are no longer cost effective to fix, given their complexity. They just get replaced. Most recently is the new 4.3L V6 in GM C/K trucks and G-vans. The vario-cam, cylinder deactivation, etc. stuff is all depending on lots of oil flow, clean oil, with no chunks coking up all the countless little passages. They have no tolerance for neglect. The fleets are finding this out the hard way. The old 4.3L V6 (especially the REALLY old TBI ones from the early '90s) were tough engines that could take all kinds of neglect and abuse. Not as powerful, not as clean, not as fuel efficient, but a weak, thirsty, dirty engine that still runs will get your truck to the job site. A fancy new one with a perpetual MIL on that just left you dead on the side of the road won't.