dang, I'm late to another party.
I had a 2011 Jetta M6 with 167k miles when I was notified the fix was available. So I made the appointment, removed my Malone Stage2 tune, and drove it in. They sat on the car for 2 weeks before looking at it, all the time them paying for a rental car (POS Buick). While the dealership had it the CEL came on. They called me to tell me the CEL light came on pre-fix and VW would not let them do the fix until they resolved the CEL. The SA said his tech had been on the phone with VW for about a day and a half and they had decided that the EGR Cooler was plugged. So I told them to fix it.
SA said VWoA would not allow them to perform the fix until all CEL codes were resolved. They wanted $2k from me to replace the EGR cooler. I said no way. I'm not paying you $2k to fix an "emissions" related part while its in your dealership for a court ordered emissions fix. Plus, I looked through all my VW paperwork, no where in that paperwork did it say I needed to deliver a "no CEL" car for the fix to be warranted.
So we went back and fourth for the next couple days, all the time while I have this rental car VW is paying for
, the SA Lead calling VWoA customer care to have them cover the EGR cooler, to which they continually refused. Closest I got to getting the EGR cooler fixed by VW is they agreed to pay the labor if I bought the $900 part at dealer cost. I still refused and asked what my buyback offer was. I liked the car, enjoyed driving the car, but wasn't willing to put even $1k into it so they could "fix" it again.
After a month of this back and forth on the fix and me having a couple different rental cars all covered by VW, the buyback for a 170k mile 2011 Jetta was $13,750 or so. Before having "Gloria" reset my VWDieselgate account back to step 3, I called the SA Lead one more time to explain there was a $200 difference in VWs favor if they just performed the fix on the car rather than buy it back. I liked the car so much, even at 170k miles, I was willing to eat the $200 to have them fix it and keep the car. He said VWoA has offered all they will (which was to cover the labor) and they would not budge any more. So they bought it back.
Reading through this thread I have to wonder how many others actually have a plugged EGR cooler and not a bad DPF or EGR Filter. I had actually swapped my EGR filter and EGR valve with my wife's car (2011 JSW TDI/DSG - 90k miles) trying to get rid of the code before taking it in. I did blow through both EGR Filters during the swap, neither one was more restrictive than the other. I also looked into the DPF being "full" and requiring a cleaning after 165k miles. It was going to be a cool $500-$600 for the cleaning 3rd party. I hadn't even thought of swapping the EGR cooler strapped to the back of the engine until the VW tech said that was "more than likely" the issue.
Props to Malone for tuning those sensors out. The car ran great on the stage2 tune even with the stock map errors. Once I went back to the stock map when I took it in for the buyback it definitely felt sluggish, but again that was after I drank the Stage2 Kool-Aid of the tune.