Bad day

Until this afternoon, I was the "proud" and "happy" owner of an Audi A3 1.8 which I considered a decent small car.

Then the engine broke down while I was coming back from work. Like that, out of the blue, the temperature went from 60C to 120C and I did an emergency stop on the first parking zone I saw. If it had happened just a few minutes earlier, I would still have been on the highway. For reasons unknown, and over a couple hundred meters, it looks like almost all the oil in the engine vanished to another dimension of space and time without leaving any trace. Half the water of the cooling system also vanished for no apparent reason. The bets are currently on a blown head gasket (possibly with a secondary water pump issue and leaky tubes) and we don't have the money to fix it this month.

The car will be checked by the Audi Center on monday, but we've already pretty much concluded we will have to sell it (for junk, if it's too expensive to repair). This will definitely be the last car from VAG we ever have. For not much more than what we paid the A3, we could have had a nice Mazda 2 which drinks less and is usually, unlike my VAG experience, trouble free.

On a limited non-representative sample size of 2 VAG cars, 100% of them died on me from engine-related troubles. Both died while under 100.000km and being less than 8 years old. This, compared to the mileage I got from Toyota and Nissan, is simply unacceptable. My first car was a Toyota possibly as old as I was and had been driven over 300.000km. The panels were eaten through by rust and the direction column gave up, but the engine was still going strong (for a 1l engine, that is).

I'll see the repair quote for the Audi on monday, but from past experience with VAG it will be the kind of money I don't have. The price to fix my Golf G60 was actually higher than the residual value of the car.

From this afternoon, I'm a totally broke and car-less for an unknown duration. I'm still trying to figure out a way to go to work next week.