Car reliability is often overlooked by the automotive media, much to the dismay of our readers. It's the one thing that can cost you a fortune, yet is often seen as biased when reported upon.
Whenever we learn about a particular engine being unreliable and report on it, the comments are always "that's unfounded" or "the competition paid you off." However, German website Auto Bild has been doing detailed teardowns of entire cars to see how they withstood the test of driving, often after about 100,000 kilometers.
The today-you-learned German word is: Dauertest, which means "endurance test." And if you search YouTube for that, you'll find many more videos than we can share or discuss in this post, perhaps ones for the used car you're interested in buying next.
But we're only going to look at the Passat, since it's relatively upmarket and supposedly built for long trips, plus it has the popular TSI engine (TDI would have been better, though). However, we also embedded the Golf 6, the old Focus and the popular city car VW Up!.
The Passat is a 2016 model with 150,000km on the clock. Its owner said the seats were very comfortable on longer journeys, but complained about the stop-start system being "dumb" and sign recognition misbehaving sometimes. Keep in mind that the test wasn't done before because the Passat felt too fresh at the time.
It's amazing to see this car spread into tens or hundreds of little pieces, especially when you consider that it's still probably worth about €15,000. Everything is inspected - chassis corrosion, cylinder wear, the turbocharger and all the loose pieces of trim. Auto Bild reports that everything is in order here and the car was ready for another 50,000km. Will that be the case with other models they tested? We'll let you find out.
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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