Over the past 10 years, the demeanor of quite a few of the posters on these forums has gone from supportive and helpful and investigative, to completely hostile toward the poster and not the subject of the post itself.
This particular post started out with a TDI owner simply stating what happened to him during his visit to the service area of his new car dealership, while he was trying to work out a stereo problem.
Because during my career, I worked in and managed a technical failure analysis lab for a steel company, I made a sarcastic (most people don't understand sarcasm today unless you inform them beforehand that the following statement is intended to be sarcastic) comment regarding VWA and their approach. For that I was subsequently belittled for my blatant stupidity regarding the facilities at Bosch.
I made another comment, simply stating what the AMERICAN BILL OF RIGHTS states in Amendment 4, and what a individual owner was obligated to provide to VWA or anyone for that matter, and was immediately bundled in with any and all WACKO POLITICAL radio talk forums (I strongly believe in the 2nd Amendment too). The last time I checked both Republicans and Democrats were still considered AMERICANS and referring to the Constitution did not make you a wacko.
The point of this current response is to explain to those who care, and those with reading comprehension problems too (oh I didn't say sarcasm is coming before writing that, too bad P-nut) that over the past three model years there have been problems with the fuel systems in the VW TDIs driven in the United States.
It is (to the engineering mind) obvious by the request from VW for a fuel sample from the individual TDI owners' tank, that the wholesale diesel fuel supplier has evidenced to VW that the problem is not theirs.
It can also be inferred that the material suppliers have vindicated themselves from blame also.
I still don't buy that the total chain of material suppliers are clean, from what I have seen in the processing anomolies in the scores of cold forging operations and subsequent heat treatment facilities that I have audited during my career.
I would also hazard to say that VW has, to a statistically acceptable quantity of data points, and "6 sigma" resultant, satisfied themselves that the problem is not with the retail fuel seller.
VW is now at the end of the line, sampling the fuel in the tanks of the end user, us, the owners. And I will bet that in random sampling of fuel in our tanks they are going to find various trace problems, to in their minds, a significant degree.
I say this because those of us who are on this board, and have been for several years, will not be going to the dealer for work on our cars in the first place, and the preponderance of new TDI purchasers are new first time diesel buyers.
Now we have had reports on the board from newbies that they have from partially to a full tank, refueled with gasoline. A few have caught the problem before they turned the key, several have not.
To find a problem with a sample in a laboratory it simply depends on how tightly you want to standardize the machine and what National Bureau of Standards calibration standard you are working with. Most samples will probably test clean but I would bet "6 sigma" will not test clean. Based on that testing, VW will turn a colder shoulder to the victim of a future failure.
I still think the cause of the problem is (very random) with the forger/heat treater and resides in inconsistent inadequately controlled finished forged part cooling rates.
