Secret Keep-It-On-The-Downlow-Until-They-Own-The-Car Number 10: Your TDI engine absolutely REQUIRES the use of a special synthetic engine oil that meets VW specification 507.00. Get a quart of the correct oil from your dealer when you take delivery of the car and keep it stashed in the car in case you need to top off the oil level prior to a scheduled oil change.
I used to sell VWs and sold lots of TDIs. It was common practice at our store among the sales staff to tell people about the idiosyncracies of owning a TDI pre-purchase. Then, if they eventually bought one, during the delivery of the car, one of the last things I did was show the owner around under the hood and point out, for instance where to check your oil. At this time, again I would emphasize that the car needed special oil, etc. I also typically put a little colored tab on the page of the owners manual dealing with this, so they could find it easily in the future.
I bought a fair number of my clients small VW related gifts, too. With the TDI people, I almost always bought them a liter of oil and put it in the trunk, and pointed out to them that it was there.
Now, don't get me wrong. I could easily, drawing on my dealer experience, come up with a top ten list. But considering that the oil information is right there in the manual, and at both stores I worked at we made it plain as day for people, oil would not be on my list.
Yeah, I've found that the board can be a little, shall we say, serious at times. But, we are up for some fun too, you just have to say something funny to get us started.
For instance, one of my top ten things VW did not tell you, at least when I worked there 5 years ago, was that not only was your driver's window one touch down, but it had a secret high speed express down feature that would randomly activate after about a year. Another would be that the first New Beetle Convertibles off the line had a special feature where, in addition to the top being either closed or open, there was a halfway mode that would channel a cooling breeze directly into the passenger compartment. Of course I'm referring to the window regulator issues where the glass would one day just drop into the door, and the huge number of NBC convertible tops that failed halfway raised in the early cars due to a bad microswitch. Customers really loved that one, especially when parts were on galactic backorder. Fortunately, you can release the mechanism and operate the top manually, but people for some reason were still not real excited about it.
